[open] all a bad dream spinning in your lonely head [AQ, birthing]

[Ghoulish]

KRIEG

Even in her prime Krieg was not what you would call a good mother. A stretch to call her a mother at all, really. While she was always fiercely protective of her children, those through blood and those adopted, it was never truly for the right reasons. She had raised and molded them all, including her adopted daughter, to grasp for power without having to do any of the work herself. She had collected them like shining trophies, showing obvious favor without even attempting to hide it from the others.

And now, carrying another babe of her all powerful and beloved dark God, would be no different. Carnage. Her body tingled at the thought of him and his power. How she had awed at his presence when her adopted daughter had summoned him with fire and blood. Something reminiscent of a little purr reverberated through her at the memory of it, closing her eyes and remembering as vividly as she could. The death pit, the blood, the fire. The war. After ages of wandering and stealing years from those who would likely do more with them than she would ever even think of, she found herself pregnant again with the Dark God’s child.

Initially she was delighted by it - the thought of bringing another into Beqanna for Him. As the pregnancy progressed, though, something was clearly not right. Every night as the sun sank below the horizon Krieg would become so ill. Her coat, the color of stomach acid, a vile green, would be soaked and frothy with sweat as she spent the nights shaking with fever. Her bones felt like they would burst from under her if she tried to stand and walk, muscles weak and quivering. Every morning, though, the sun would rise and the pain and fever would leave her as quickly as it began.

Birth could not come soon enough.

When it did, it was evening. She had found herself in a land that felt like Carnage. There was something about him here. His mark, burned into her flesh the day he lit the Valley ablaze and burned them all, tingled on her skin as she strode across the dusty land in the fading spring sun. Krieg didn’t see any sign of him, or anyone for that matter, when the feeling of labor began to creep across her body. The creep of pain quickly raged into an inferno.
And it was hell.
She begged for it to end.
As the moon rose and lit the land with silver light, it was over.

Her body aching and quivering, she could barely raise her head to glance at the creature. And a creature it was. She rested for a moment, regaining her bearings and a drop of strength before getting to work on the babe.

She stepped back after deciding the thing was alive and clean enough. She nudged the creature into standing on wobbly legs and frowned. The sickly coloring of his fur was decorated with black skeletal markings and his eyes were a haunting orange. “Well aren’t you interesting…” she muttered to the babe as she continued to look him over. A boy, of course it was a boy. Her only other son had been Kars. The color of a swamp with tattered and deformed wings. Her daughters had always been perfect.

Krieg sighed and continued her motherly duties, allowing the boy to suckle as she stared off at the sun that was disappearing to the horizon, night swallowing the earth. When he was finished she turned to fuss over him some more. She froze as her eyes landed on what was previously a healthy looking foal, despite his coloring and markings and ghoulish eyes. He now looked like she had drug him out of the death pits in the ancient long gone Valley. Tufts of fur looked torn away, his tail was bone, an ear was missing, eyes milky white as if blind.

He stumbled towards her and she took a step back, a sound like a hiss escaping her. Despite looking like he’d been drug from the grave, he seemed fine. Her ears pinned back as she looked him over. She reached out towards him and gave a sniff. He didn’t smell like death and decay the way the truly dead do. The small creature pushed near to her, stumbling into her leg and laying down, exhausted. Krieg decided she was also exhausted and she would deal with whatever plagued the boy after some rest. She lowered to the ground to provide him warmth and closed her black beady eyes.

When dawn came and Krieg opened her eyes she pushed to her feet and looked over the still slumbering boy. Confusion crossed her as she realized all of his missing flesh and exposed bones had returned to their proper state. She frowned, had she imagined it? The boy stirred and opened his eyes, lashes fluttering to expose those haunting orange eyes. The milky white was gone. “You’re a Ghoulish little thing, aren’t you?” she murmured to him.

Deciding he was fine, Krieg roused him to his feet again. The hours behind them had provided some steadiness to his gangly legs. He nursed and returned to the ground to slumber again. Krieg looked around and sighed. A sudden realization hit her that she had no real desire to be a mother, not right now. She was tired, the pregnancy and birth had depleted her. She lowered her head to the boy and with a gentle touch, he began to grow and age. Just old enough to survive without sustenance from her. She would never take too much from her children despite her selfish nature.

Krieg watched curiously as the little creature stirred in his sleep, surprisingly not waking from the power that had stolen a part of his youth. Oddly she felt as though his yellow-green fur had a strange, almost eerie glow to it that she hadn’t noticed before. He appeared almost radioactive. Perhaps it was remnants of the magic she had used to take away some of the youth? Had something gone awry when she took from him? She then decided she was likely imagining it, like she had imagined his rotting body in the night.

A small ache began to flutter in her chest at the thought of abandoning him. She did have some form of a maternal instinct, somewhere, but not enough to stay or to take him with wherever she went this time. He would be fine in this land of Carnage, she was certain of it. Her mind wandered to the tingling mark on her chest again and she found reassurance in that. Krieg turned away from the creature, looked back, and then retreated into the distance.

The foal stirred a little more, orange eyes blinking open to watch his mother fade into the haze. He fumbled with his gangly legs beneath him, somehow they felt as if they were longer than they were when he had laid down to sleep. Stumbling to his hooves he lurched and wobbled to get his bearings. When he felt his legs become a slight bit more sturdy beneath him, he turned to follow her. His mother. Perhaps she had thought he was following and didn’t notice he wasn’t.

But when he moved, she was gone.

The colt looked in every direction for her but could not see her green form anywhere in the distance. He continued to stumble on his unsteady, unnaturally long legs. There was no one to be seen, not his mother, not a stranger, not a single living creature against the expanse of Pangea. The world around him was glowing in the daylight, yellow and red and dust billowing in the breeze. He tried to call for her, but all that escaped him was an exasperated cry.

He coughed and choked on the dust in the air, his mouth feeling so suddenly dry. He looked about the area until he found the river gurgling in the distance and stumbled towards it. As he neared and heard the gurgling and saw the inviting water, his steps hastened. Uncoordinated and jerking movements until he collapsed at the water’s edge, dipping his head to drink hastily. He brought his head up and gasped, suddenly so hungry for the dry air as water dripped from his face.

The colt coughed and gasped, taking another long drink and looked down to the flowing water, catching a rippling, distorted mirror image of his young face. A glowing yellow-green face, orange eyes, black markings decorating his face as if his skull lived outside of his body. He could vaguely make out the black tufts of hair sprouting between his ears, short and waving in the breeze. Pushing his way back up onto his long, wobbling legs he continued to stare down at his reflection, a small frown coming across his young face. Ghoulish little thing, aren’t you wavered through his mind in his mother’s voice.

Ghoulish. What his mother had called him. What he was, who he was. Just Ghoulish.

krieg  ghoulish

THIS IS HOW AN ANGEL DIES

photo manip by Maat

1514 words for Glowing from Krieg being a toxic, life stealing mother

[jamie]

jamie

The ghosts watch.
The ghosts always watch.

They come to him sometime later with news of a child that had seemed to die in the night and then woke anew in the morning. They tell him, too, that the child’s mother had gone but this is of significantly less interest than the tales they tell of the milk-white eyes, the slack flesh, the ugliness of death.

He thinks of Miseria, how he had cobbled her together with the flesh of dead things to resemble the first triplets, the Fates. Could it be that there is another thing like her in the world? Another rancid, decaying thing? And he tells the ghosts to take him to this child, so they do.

He watches first from a distance as the child stumbles to the water and drinks. But this cannot be the right child, as this child is not dead at all. His stumbling is due only to his youth, the coltish limbs, it is not a death stagger. He is only young, he tells the ghosts, but they insist.

At long last, he crosses the expanse of desert that separates them. There is a map of the boy's bones on his coat, an advertisement of all the vulnerable parts. Jamie remembers how his own joints had ached in his youth, how the pain had crippled him. He had been such a sickly thing once and there are times where he misses it. (Just recently he had missed it enough to return to the cave where he had spent much of his youth, enough to return to the pain and the exhaustion and the fear of his youth itself.)

“The ghosts tell me that you died in the night,” he says to the boy, his voice fog-thin, his strange head tilted. “Is that true?”

and i was in the darkness

so darkness i became

[Ghoulish]

dropping little reels of tape to remind me that i'm alone

playing movies in my head that make a porno feel like home

He stared down at his reflection, ripples created by the drops of water falling from his face distorting the mirrored image. After what seemed like an eternity to the new creature, he backed away from the water's edge. His long legs betrayed him and he stumbled. The glowing yellow-green boy tumbled to the dusty earth again with a squeal of surprise and pain as the dry ground scraped against his soft new flesh, opening small wounds that oozed red. He stared down at his forelegs as the liquid slowly pooled dark against the garish color of his hide.

What a start to life.

Gathering his bearings once again he pushed to his hooves, wincing against the burn and ache of his body and willing it to hold him upright. It didn't betray him this time, despite the wobble still evident from the twitching of his muscles as they learned to hold him in place. A movement in the edge of his vision caught his attention and pulled his orange eyes from the wounds on his gangly legs. He startled slightly at the stranger approaching. There was something about him that set the boy on edge, something unnatural and not right.

He stiffened a bit, again mentally demanding his body to behave, to stay upright, to stay brave as his instincts told him that perhaps he should turn and leave. Perhaps he should try and find his mother.
But he didn't. He stared, stiff as a statue as the stranger then spoke. His voice sent a chill over the boy's body, prickling down his spine, but he did not move.

Died? Was he dead? Was that why she had left him? Had he died and his mother tried to revive him and that was what had gone all wrong? Was this stranger a creature of the afterlife? Empty space hung between them for a moment as he glanced back down to his glowing legs where the blood had begun to coagulate along the small scrapes. "I don't think I died." the boy said softly, no confidence behind the words. He couldn't be sure, but he didn't think he would bleed if he were dead. "Do the dead bleed?" He asked, certain if the stranger was a creature from beyond the living that he would know. 

ghoulish

Image Credit
@ jamie

[jamie]

jamie

What courage! He watches the boy stiffen, demanding his body cooperate. It is with fondness that Jamie remembers how impossible it had felt, trying to get his own coltish limbs to hold him up, how they had ached in protest. He wonders if the boy feels pain or if the weakness in his limbs comes only from their youth. The boy does not grimace or whimper, so there must not be any real pain beyond the stinging of split skin.

He does not think he died, but Jamie wonders what the child knows of dying. The ink-black mouth quirks with the question. “Sometimes,” he answers and thinks of Miseria again, the steady stream of blood from her eyes, though he had dragged her up out of the pits of hell already dead. There is no blood in her veins, no heart in her chest, and still she bleeds. Still, the blood drips bright red down her nose and collects in puddles at her feet. “It depends on what made them.”

What made the boy?

“Do you feel dead?” he asks, though it is a silly question to ask someone so young that they barely know what it feels like to be alive. Perhaps it is only because he remembers what it had felt like to be a cowering thing that he does not simply peer beneath the boy’s skin to see if there’s a heart beating in his chest.

Perhaps his curiosity lies more with whether or not the boy believes himself a living thing.

and i was in the darkness

so darkness i became

@Ghoulish

[Ghoulish]

dropping little reels of tape to remind me that i'm alone

playing movies in my head that make a porno feel like home

The eerie, not right voice comes from the stranger again and his ears twitch in response. It depends on what made them. He does not know what that means, exactly. What made him?
He is made from nothing good, exactly, but he doesn't know that. He knows pain, wobbly limbs that do not seem to obey, and an empty feeling that his mother should have filled before escaping to live her life and leaving him to the buzzards. 

"What makes us? What makes someone dead?" He asked inquisitively. What questions. Only hours old and already asking the big things to this otherworldly stranger. "I have a mom." The boy stated. Had would have been a better word to use, but he doesn't know she isn't returning. Instinct tells him she will come back - that's what mothers do, right? Good mothers, but his mother is Krieg, and she is not remotely close to the category of a good mother.

Does he feel dead? His eyes blinked slowly at the question as he wondered what he felt. "What is dead supposed to feel like?" The boy asked softly. He glanced down at his bloodied knees again. The liquid was no longer escaping the rips in his skin but crusted and dark. "That hurt when I fell..." His voice trailed off as he suddenly felt sad. Something deep told him he shouldn't have been left to fall and bleed entirely alone.

But she had left him. So perhaps he was dead. Perhaps he is an illusion and none of this is even reality.

The sight of his crusted knees began to blur a bit as something watery filled his eyes. He blinked the liquid away quickly and returned his orange gaze back to the creature that had discovered him. "Are you dead? Where are we?" That would explain it all for the boy. He was dead, this creature was dead, and his mother hadn't abandoned him.

ghoulish

Image Credit

@ jamie

[jamie]

jamie

It is the most he has spoken to a child, he thinks, since he was one. Of his own children, only the Fates had heard so much of his voice. The Nymphs had been banished almost immediately upon their births, stolen away from their mother and shackled to the bodies of water in which they have remained for years. It is not conversation he has with Miseria, he merely whispers his orders directly into her mind and she does his bidding. And he had taken the son down to the water and watched him drown, the daughter safe at her mother’s breast because he had not known what to make of the thing. She had been an accident.

And yet, the boy asks him questions and he considers how to answer. Strangely, he thinks of his mother and the keen interest she had taken in a child, once. Neither him nor his sister, but the White magician, Beyza.

He shifts his weight, thinks to call upon Miseria now to show him a dead thing. Instead, he turns his focus to someplace in the distance, calls upon flesh and bones, watches them piece themselves back together in the approximation of what they’d once been. Rabbits, deer, limp-winged birds, they all hobble, broken, toward them, called upon by the shadow creature.

“They are dead,” he tells the boy without taking his eyes from them. Not until they settle at his flank does he look to the boy again. The boy, who tells him that he has a mother, that it had hurt when he’d fallen. And, with that, Jamie understands that the boy is not dead after all. The dead do not feel pain. He exhales a raspy sigh and the creatures crumple.

“This is Pangea,” he says. He, too, had been born here, though his mother had not abandoned him in quite the same way. “I am not dead and neither are you.”

and i was in the darkness

so darkness i became

@Ghoulish

[Ghoulish]

dropping little reels of tape to remind me that i'm alone

playing movies in my head that make a porno feel like home

The stranger looked away and the boy shifted uneasily on his wobbling legs. He wondered what would happen next if they were dead. Was this what the dead did, where they went? A dusty, barren land to wander forever. Would he forever be stuck in this form? Would he grow big and strong or was wobbling and weak his fate? His heart fluttered as he began to spiral with worry, glancing between the creature and whatever was happening in the distance.

The boy began to open his mouth to ask a question, unsure what question, when he was startled by what exactly the shadow man had been looking at. Instinct again told him to run. Gather those unsteady legs, tuck tail, and go. But he did not move, could not move. His orange eyes were locked on the posse of the undead. They maneuvered over the barren land in an unnatural fashion that made his heart pump faster and his breath a bit shaky. He wasn't sure why, but it made him feel...fear? Anxious? Something.

The small boy stumbled back a bit as they grew nearer and stopped along the stranger. They are dead. He stared with wide eyes at the gathering of bones and rotted flesh, mangled remains of things. He kicked a foreleg out before him, looking down at the mostly intact flesh. There were no bones, his knees were scraped but not rotted. The mirrored image he saw in the rippling water did not look like those things.

Suddenly, though, he recalls the way his mother had looked at him. The look on her face and the way she recoiled was the way he felt when he saw what he now knows as death.
He frowned at the memory as the stranger sighed and the dead collapsed in heaps.

As the dead lay there and the eerie voice came again, naming the place Pangea and asserting that they are not dead, he felt no reassurance. His mother had looked at him like he didn't belong. "If I am not dead, and you are not dead, why did you ask if I was dead?" The boy questioned, still staring at the piles of The Dead. "Why did my mom act like that when she saw me?" As if the shadow had been there to see the reaction. Then he moves his gaze from the listless things and back to the shadow creature, "Who are The Ghosts? You said The Ghosts told you I died in the night." It seems to be universal across species that all children are full of questions, reasonable or not.

ghoulish

Image Credit
@ jamie