damaskrose345

[damaskrose345]

"Eden"

happy halloween !

October 27th, 1889

I have become terrified with myself.

Each new dawn brings a sharper revolution of horror, a new bone within my frame that is mangled into grotesquery. I do not allow myself to gaze out of the window for I know I will be enticed to set this creature upon the society which I adore. It is terrible, this dark gift. 

Oftentimes, in the bleakest hour of night, my mind wanders to the gospel. Tragic, is it not, that someone so distant from Heaven can still imagine the path home? I think about Christ on his cross, about Abraham, the Holy Virgin, and every saint and sinner fashioned in a righteous image.

But I think about God most of all. That is all I can do. Even as I toil in the shadows, sewing souls back into corpses, He is here. Even as I plunder His heaven of angels and raise the dead, God watches. 

Is He as horrified with me as I am with myself? Am I a devil in His divine eyes? Tell me, if we are all God’s children, and He takes us to Eden above when we die, then what does that make me? If I take people away from their paradise, then am I not the serpent and devil? 

I have been called a savior before. I have been revered and respected and showered with praise. Within me lies the power to end the scourge of death from humanity, but where is my right? Corpses cannot speak. Families, though well-meaning, have no place to vouch. The dead have no say in whether I steal away their rest. Yet I do it. I save them. What a deceptive word— “saving.” 

One success should have been enough. There should not have been more. For when an army of these half-rotted husks are recalled to the world, what then? And when the Reaper finally calls on me like a courter, what then for me? This science (if it can even be called that) will share my death date. No one henceforth will be able to plague the world as I have done. When I am struck down by the Almighty, even if I am doomed to rot in hell for all time, at least I will have that: eternity. The very thing I will gain is what I have robbed so many others of. 

That is my triumph and my curse. 

But for now, all I can do is slave on. Despite the anguish it brings me, my perdition began as my greatest dream, and like a mother with her babe, I love it unconditionally. Perhaps it will kill me.

I pray it does. 

[damaskrose345]

"We Will Be Warm"

If you find this letter, I am dead, and our God and Devil turned out to be one and the same.  

I lost count of the prayers and pleas we had amassed for the Lord. So much wasted breath employed in begging a deaf deity for deliverance, so much finite vitality spent beseeching God to pass us away from that darkness and into the light— that of the grave or rescue, it mattered not to our frost-addled souls. We only wanted warmth, and if that warmth could only be found under pilings of soil, then let it be. All of our energy, that precious ambrosia that, once lost, can never be recovered, was blasted away in barren begging. We knew no heroes would break through the ice like Christ resurrected. As we starved and shivered, huddled tight in flocks of wind-worn leather, blistered flesh, and vacant voids of hopeless eyes, we knew this place was far beyond God’s reach.

Sun dogs refracted above our frames, washing us in sunlight devoid of true heat. It bore down like the eye of a cruel beholder, some verily depraved spectre who saw us rotting upon the floes of ice and took amusement in the scene, showering us with false warmness so that we could delude ourselves into feeling its kiss upon our skin, only to glance down through frosted lashes at where such a kiss was placed, and see a patchwork of stony flesh numb to all sense. Skin so mangled by the cold that it mocks you, unfeeling as iron and the color of pitch, of the coals that haunted our frigid dreams. We dreamt so viciously of heat that it became a part of our bodies, even as our souls glaciated. 

A small boy, having not even graced his thirteenth year, lay beside me one night on the tundra. The others were scattered about the site. Some were dead, some, one could not tell. But all was silent, save for the savage howl and snarl of wind and the laborious breathing of our cadaverous camp. The boy was pressed to my side. I could feel him shiver. I could feel every shaking breath he took. I could practically feel the life seeping out of him as the endless night marched on, forging ever onward across the wasteland, the moon the only lantern to be found. 

The silence broke. The boy’s voice creaked past his rocklike lips. 

“Is heaven this cold?” he whispered. The wind nearly stole his words from me, but I heard him well. 

I hardly possessed the spirit to answer. “No,” was all I could reply. 

Another lapse of iron silence. I awaited the boy’s next question. I knew he had one. All children are curious; even the frozen reaper could not change that. 

After an age, he spoke once again. “Will God warm us when we die?” he asked. 

My eyes were fixed on the sweep of stars above. They glimmered freely, for no cloud was there to bury them. One vastness above, one below. I knew no warmth existed in the open wild of space, yet I did not believe any wildness could be more desolate than the tundra. 

My tongue blotted at my lips vainly, trying to wet them so that my words did not share our fate. “Yes,” I told the boy softly, weakly. “The stars. They are warm. God puts us among them like….” Exhaustion leadened my mind, but I battled. “A hearth. We will be warm.” 

 Frost clung to my lashes. I would have wept, but my tears had been hardened to stones within my face. I watched the stars dance and scamper like children across the inky sky. Then, an interloping figure broke into my vision. It rose slowly, ever so slowly, and swayed in the same manner as a tree in a storm. The small branches of the tree emerged, curled and trembling. The trunk was wrapped in old leather and wool frayed by exposure, and with a sick wrenching of my gut, I realized whose arm I gazed at. 

The boy reached up to the stars. Against the backdrop of the heavens, I was reminded of just how delicate his frame was. How young. How moribund.

His fingers did not grasp at the sight in the way an infant might do so for its mother. He could not, for such a meager action would cause his fingers to snap clean off. No, he could not. He kept his arm raised high with his little hand edged in black. 

I know not when, but I eventually drifted into sleep. 

In the morning, when I awoke like a corpse recalled to life, the first thing my eyes beheld was the arm of the boy, remaining in its stretch towards the sky. His hand was virginal white and pallid blue, his fingertips the color of onyx. I looked at the boy’s face and saw only a youthful face leached of all life and hue. His eyes were closed, tucked into slumber behind his frosted lashes. He was dead. 

Myself and a handful of the surviving men spent the following day burying the child. Had we possessed our usual strength, the affair would have been done in less than an hour, but death loomed over us all, and thus one child’s burial cost us one full day. The grave was shallow, and as we laid the boy into the hardened earth, an obstacle appeared before us. 

The boy’s arm. 

It remained upright as it had been when he died and was all but cemented that way by the elements. The grave, I recall, was not deep enough to cover the child without all of him lying completely flat. The arm had to be lowered to entirely bury him. We had to either snap the arm to settle it or bury what we could and embark further on toward the mainland. 

I reached towards the corpse, clasping my own frostbitten fingers around the arm. It was so thin, I remember, so fragile like the wing of a songbird. I imagined the splintering crack breaking it would create, a sound that would echo in my mind for all my days remaining. I could not do it. I released the boy from my grasp, affirmed my fellow undertakers, and covered the small boy with snow and gravel. 

God forgive me. God forgive my cowardice and my cruelty. We left the boy as he died, arm eternally reaching up towards the high heavens and the God who was not here. There was no marker upon his grave, only a frail arm sprouting from the snow like a lily. 

The arm watched us as we turned and staggered across the wasteland, and each time I turned back to cast another look, it kept shrinking until, at last, when I turned, it had vanished entirely into the white nothingness of the tundra. 

My heart is heavy as I write this. My mind is forever preyed upon by the image of the child’s dead hand and the horrific sound of the mercy I could have shown had I simply snapped it. But mercy does not exist in this place. As I write this, I know my time on this earth is swiftly coming to an end, and I hope only that my final words to that boy ring true. 

I pray God will put us among the stars when we finally pass. 

I pray God will warm us. 

I pray we will be warm.  

[damaskrose345]

"Vampyr"

I wanted to try something a little darker for Halloween season, and ofc after binging the entirety of the Interview With The Vampire series, I felt pretty inspired! Enjoy :)

{CONTENT WARNING}: blood, heavy gore, vampire stuff, etc.

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Every day, I regret what I did, and every night I regret not doing it sooner. My nails were buried into the grisly chasms of Ehrys’ sockets. The blood that gushed out of them was so dark it appeared black, defiling both our skin like oceans of spilled ink. He was screaming so loudly, I remember, so loudly that my ears rang. It was not my own voice that had been resonating inside my mind, but his. He cried out in agony and clawed at my arms in vain, for I was unmoving. As I recall dimly, he shrieked my name once or twice. The blood pooled under his pretty curls, leaking out around his head like a sanguine halo. It was an oddly beautiful scene.  Pain shredded at my arms as Ehrys fought against me, tearing at my flesh like a wild animal. His screams turned to sobs. He sobbed so pathetically that I quickly could not stand it any longer. The mad dog within me hungered for more, but my conscience called it to heel. I could not withstand Ehrys’ agony any more than he could.  This was the man I loved, despite it all. Despite what he had done, or never did, I would not be as cruel as him. I withdrew my right hand from his face with a vile squelching sound, reaching beside Ehrys’ twitching body into the garden of glass we lay upon. My slick fingers curled around one of the largest shards. The firelight flickered across its face, marking it red even before it could be used.  Ehrys began to cry, making a low moan and begging me for mercy. “I… I-I’m sorry…” he wept. “Ple—“ His words were cut off by another pitiful wail. His hands scraped fruitlessly at the floor.  I grasped the shard and leveled it above his chest. Then I plunged it down, feeling it sink deep into the pulp of his heart. Ehrys lurched upwards, every muscle in him going taut. He gasped. The bloody pits where his eyes were went wide, wider than I ever thought a mortal could manage, until, with a final shudder, he went limp against the floor.  My beloved was dead. The traitorous darling of mine who was once the sole reason for my existence now lay dead by my hand. It is difficult to convey in precise description my feelings following this new reality. I felt neither triumphant nor mournful. There was no grief to be found nor any sense of celebration. Ehrys’ death appeared to me as an indisputable fact, something inevitable that, though hefty in its execution, was something better done than not.  His corpse was motionless under me, silent and stiff and sticky with blood. I unsheathed both my thumb from his eye and the shard from his heart. I tossed the glass aside and leaned forward, palms pressed to his gory figure.  He smelled only of copper. No sultry aroma smothered him anymore. There was only the stench of death and betrayal.  The smell got stronger as I neared his face. His mouth remained open in an eternally petrified ‘o’, and, with his lips cracked and wide in shock, I could not kiss them. So I leaned further and planted my own between his brows, lingering a moment to taste the layer of blood dried there. He tasted as delectable as always, yet the Reaper’s touch had soured the flavor a bit. But it was still the sweetness of Ehrys, and for that I continued to kiss him ardently, pausing in places where the blood was the thickest.  I kissed my beloved traitor until his gruesome face was cleaned of red. 

[damaskrose345]

"Banshee"

She was the old hymn of the bayou, something eternal with a skin of scarlet clay bedecked with ibis tracks.

Her hair was a cascade of Spanish moss, coils, and tendrils of silvery green that echoed the hide of lurking gators. Maybe that was the reason those ancient beasts paid her no heed; just as Cerberus yielded to the hand of Hades, their maws of force never dared to bite her. As she passed over the murky mirror face in the night pit, reptilian heads would rise from the mire and attend to her as hounds of fang and scale. They followed where she went, and some began to say that where her children crawled upon the land, the Bayou's Banshee would soon follow to evoke the taking of a soul. 

They said her veins pulsed swamp water, that the air around her form was as stifling as the backwater and whipped as fast as a moccasin's strike. They said her eyes were the same golden voids as those affixed into the skulls of her gators. Those who claimed to have encountered her say that, when she spoke, all that emerged was a gurgle, a drowned kind of noise that spilled from her lips like oil. The voice of drowning, some say. One feels it in their gut— the plunge from surface to bayou bottom is great, and those who hear the Banshee cannot help but feel as if they're sinking into the mud. 

Her voice in their ear, a twisted hand of cypress shackles around their wrist, and all sunshine falls away.

Then their eyes blot against the bog, and brackish blood pours into their throat. They look up at the pallid blur of summer's sun, high above the depths, and reach up towards it. Lichen patches the flesh of their hand. They scream under the water only to find their voice gone, replaced by the dead sound of the Banshee, the call of a corpse devoured by the swamp. Sunrays, the few daring enough to grace the pitch, are slaughtered as massive forms sail by above. Reptant reapers circle like vultures, tails slicing like knives. Yellow slits fixate on their offering; they dive, for the Banshee loves her children, and a mother must provide. The prey goes to scream once more as the beasts descend, yet cannot. Leeches writhe against their tongue and teeth. 

The Banshee's young open their mighty jaws and seize that which their mother gave, tearing sinew and shattering bone and rending limb from frame in a cloud of sanguine brutality. Fang punctures lung. Legs kick viciously in rebuke, only to be ripped away. The corpse call resonates against the muddy floor, a shriek of terror and pain as both life and soul are stolen. Yet beyond the realm of the swamp's depths, nary a leaf trembles.

The Banshee hovers above the surface, staring silently at the butchery below. Though the murk hides the scene, she feels its violence like wind on her face. Around her, the bayou is untouched. Terra cotta light pours through the reigning tupelos, the very same color as the blood her children emerge with on their mouths. 

They look up at her, and she smiles down at them. 

As they dip back into the water, so too does the sun behind the horizon, and evening streams into the swamplands. Her children rest for now, sated by the carrion of the unfortunate, but in the ebony domain of nightfall, they will hunt again by their mother's side.