07-30-2015, 05:58 PM
this one goes out to you; my little h e a r t w o r m The world burns. She’s watched one world crumble and burn and turn to ash and now, there is another. From the mountaintop, they watch. They listen to the screams of those who were not fast enough to outrun the sea of fire. They breathe in lungfuls of acrid smoke. No one speaks, not yet. Low sobs echo out, but Heartworm does not weep. Not yet. Night comes, and for the first time in a long time, she loses her flesh. Her skin becomes looser, drips onto on the ground. She doesn’t notice, at first. She is thinking of the lands lost, of castles with diamond walls, a small girl’s smile that could melt your heart. She does not mourn Beqanna overmuch – there was little there for her – but she mourns the other world, her dream world. She mourns Iris most of all, and thinks of how real it had felt, kissing the girl’s dirty brow as she said goodbye. A larger chunk of flesh drops, hits the ground with a nauseating squelch, and she realizes. Her curse is back. Beqanna might be gone but the ill magic that was bred in her is not. It does not take long before she is a skeleton, walking among them, and it must looks like she’s dying, to watch her. No creature should survive the loss of its flesh, its heart. She seems like a thing made of dark magic, and certainly her bloodline promises it, she is the result of an incestuous breeding between a dark god and his undead daughter, of course the thing they produced is doomed. Some of them shy from her. One woman (a chestnut mare, whose name, Heartworm will later learn, is Judea), shrieks that she is the devil sprung forth, the last drop of Beqanna’s magic, and that she should be sacrificed back unto the land. The others do not listen, fortunately, but Heartworm wonders if it will last. She cowers and waits, afraid to sleep, counting the minutes until the sun rises and the flesh regrows across her bones like bacteria (no longer flesh eating but flesh giving, an odd reversal). Familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt. And this is no different. The days pass, and the nights come, shadows crawling over the ruined wasteland that was once their home (not mine, she thinks, flesh falling from her bones, my home is with Iris). Night comes and she turns to a skeleton again and again. Judea is the first to scorn her, but others follow soon enough. Judea notices the symbols carved on her bones (drawn there by a priestess Heartworm once knew, when she was her acolyte, when she thought there was a path for her), and it is all she needs. She does her best to make Heartworm the pariah, to turn them against her. Though they all come from a land where magic once flowed like water, where the horses were all colors of the rainbow, it seems forgotten, here. No mythics had escaped, and the colors of the survivors are the traditional ones – blacks and bays and greys, a few chestnuts and one leopard appaloosa. Heartworm, with her melting skin and skeleton night-form, seems to be the only remnant of Beqanna’s magic. Three follow Judea, at first. Three believe her fervor, that somehow Heartworm is the cause of this (or at the very least, that she is wrong, not meant to survive as they had). At first it is not so bad. Hushed whispers, sidelong glances. They don’t speak to her, but that doesn’t bother her. She can go weeks without speaking. One horse befriends her instead. A mare, gray like she is, named Cara. She asks Heartworm who she lost, when it burned. Heartworm lies and says her daughter. Cara lost her children too – several grown, and one newborn. They bond, in this way. Cara tells her about her daughter, the one lost. How her name was Celene, named for the mark on her head like a crescent moon. Heartworm does not tell Cara about the birds, or the castle, or the way Iris looked peering out from flowers as big as she was. She does not say how Iris was a rainbow. Instead she says other truths – she was kind, she was loving. (She wasn’t real.) Cara does not shy away when the transformation takes her. She watches with fascination, and asks if it hurts. It doesn’t, but so much else does. Time passes, and they eke out a living on the mountain. There isn’t much foliage and her belly always aches, and what little water they find is ashy and bracken, but they drink anyways. She always feels a little ill, and doesn’t know if it’s from circumstance or simply her mind, longing to escape. She doesn’t dream, anymore. She doesn’t notice this at first. She wonders if it’s because she’s used up all her dreaming. It hurts, though. She wonders if Iris is there, in the dreamland, waiting for her. Cara befriends a stallion and brings him into the group. His name is Zebah, a burnished chestnut stallion. He had been a loner, like her. Heartworm watches them together, the easy way they move and even smile. She is glad for them even as her heart hurts. She watches the seeds of romance be sown and planted, though neither admits to it. She is not an outcast long. There is another, a black mare, Eve. She is muscled, a warrior. They ask where she is from, who she lost, and Eve says, it doesn’t matter anymore. Eve saves them, in a way. She finds them what sustenance she can, and eats less than her share. She is rangy and has a dangerous look to her, and perhaps it keeps Judea and her lot at bay. Judea’s group grows from three to five, five to seven. They begin to spit at her feet, to whisper curses under their breaths. They argue that she should be cast out, a sacrifice to Beqanna (as if the land had not taken its fill). “Renewal means sacrifice,” Judea says to her group, who stare on in their own glass-eyed devotion. She is a port in their storm. Where they are lost, adrift, families and kingdoms made ash, Judea is there, with fevered words and a scapegoat. A plan. A promise, however ludicrous, of salvation. It all seems like so much foolishness, until The Day. No one notices the stir, at first. They are too busy surviving. Most of the days are dedicated to finding food, water, to establishing shaky relationships, remaking themselves into a society, a kingdom. Kings of the mountain. But what is a king to a god, and when the first thing is birthed forth from the ashen canal, their tenuous society crumbles to whatever dark god brought the creature forth. It is not a skeleton, though it might as well be. The skin that is stretched tight across haphazard bones is burnt; in places it is gone completely, exposing the pristine white of skull or scapula. There is no mane or tail. Some do not have eyes. Of the ones that do you wish they did not, because there is a spark in the eyes, a hunger. An animal cunning. The first one watches as the others rise up. They assemble. It opens its mouth as if to speak but instead there is only a gibbering howl, a noise felt in the marrow of their bones. The others reply in kind, their own gibbous shrieks added to the cacophony. They seem to love the sound of their voices, and are never quiet. The world is full of howling. Up on the mountain, they watch in mute horror, listen as the howls and screams rise up. They watch the dead reawaken, bodies jerking forth from their ashy graveyard. They watch them assemble. They watch them hunt. The creatures have no right to move as fast as they do, but all rights were long forsaken as the fire consumed the world. The hours pass and they hunt the few forest creatures that had not taken shelter on the mountain and tear them apart like wild dogs. There is a horse who did not escape to the mountain. Heartworm watches as they drive it from the cave, fell it, descend upon it. Their shrieks and howls have a new tang to them as they take their meal. Heartworm thinks it might be something like delight. “We’re safe up here, right?” Cara asks. They are pressed together in numb horror. Zebah and Eve come, too. Her friends. They are not like the birds, not like Corsair, certainly not like Iris – but they are all she has. “Look at them,” Heartworm says, “they don’t move right. They can’t make the climb.” She’s lying, she knows she is, but she wants to prolong this moment, keep them together. She may not be dead, but she has been a skeleton, and she knows there way ways to make such a cursed body move. “They want a sacrifice,” Judea says to her congregation, her eight (another has joined, and they are all against her now, all save for Heartworm’s three). “Give them the freak.” “Return all the magic to Beqanna, and ze will release us and call zir…things off,” she says. It almost makes sense, and for a moment, Heartworm wonders. What if none of the magic was meant to survive the fires? She does not call her curse magic by any means, but it is something impossible, and perhaps… She does not bring up the idea to her three. They are her only touchstones left. She loves them, in a different way than she loved Corsair or Iris. She loves them because they are filthy and because they are survivors. Loves them because they think no less of her as a skeleton, and do not question the symbols carved upon her bones. They remain on the mountain, a house divided, the nine zealots and the four forsaken, as the creatures below gibber and feast on Beqanna’s carcass. A fool’s hope, really, that they would be safe, but aren’t we all fools, sometimes? The creatures do not come immediately. They continue to hunt what easy prey remains. They do not discern what, or who, they feast upon. The howling does not stop. Heartworm wonders, for once ludicrous moment, if they ever stop to draw breath. And then she remembers what they are, and laughs until her laughter sours and begins to sound all too alike the creatures below. Judea continues her preaching. It is no secret they want Heartworm sacrificed, to pour back the last drops of mythical blood into the earth. And it almost starts to make sense, and she wonders whether it’s truly logical, or whether she’s going mad. She wonders which of the two she would prefer. They hear them coming, long before they see them. The gibbous shrieks foretell their coming, the noise grows louder and louder until they have to shout to be heard above the noise. The smell comes, too, a putrid stench of decay and rotting meat. The path up the mountain is not wide, and some of the creatures tumble off the side. Heartworm mutely watches one creature fall, watches as splinters of bone pierce the skin from the inside out. Watches as it rises, stumbles, howls. Before the undead reach her, there is another horse. The eight, led by Judea. The eight who think she is the reason for the creatures, the last drop of Beqanna’s magic. “You must,” says Judea. She almost sounds kind, “ze will not rest until ze has your blood.” Heartworm thinks they will force her, drive her forward to the mouth of the pathway, but instead they retreat. “Don’t,” says Eve, “don’t, you know she’s mad.” She doesn’t sound sure. There is a goodbye note in her voice. Heartworm doesn’t blame her. “Don’t,” says Zebah, but he says nothing else. He does not expect her to listen, she sees. He does not want her to listen, perhaps. They go, too, and there is only Cara. The first friend. Her confidante. “Oh, Heartworm--,” she sighs, but before she can say her goodbye, the first creature arrives. Up close, they were infinitely worse. Their bodies took on a puzzling contour from death and decay, and Heartworm felt sick and enthralled simultaneously as she beheld them. They were all shapes and sizes, and near the front was a smaller creature, the size of a newborn foal. She was hairless with drawn skin like the others, but on her forehead was the outline of a marking, one like a crescent moon. Heartworm sees it, and Cara does, too. “CELENE!” shrieks Cara, running past Heartworm, running full on into the herd, “oh, Cele—“ The words are cut off as the small creature rips the mare’s throat out, and the horde descends. They have their blood sacrifice, the blood spilling out of Cara’s body as they tear her asunder, and Heartworm, ever a coward, turns to run. |