#also references to other cryptopsy songs

[devil-doll13]

Graves of The Father

Tw: Angst, Horror, Death, Blood/Slight Gore, Implied Neglect/Abuse kinda?, Descriptions Of Corpses/Body Horrorish, like it gets a wee bit disgusting, Mentions of Birth, Religious Themes

Proceed With Caution!

I’m rather proud of this one, actually. It’s the most horror oriented fic i’ve made for Abigail yet. Some backstory/lore in here. A bit Lovecraftian but only a little. I’m still experimenting here lol.

Horror/Slasher Oc Writing For Abigail Williams

Basically a songfic, lyrics are in italics

Summary: Abigail & Her Father.

Dividers by firefly-dividers

Art by Takato Yamamoto

Sextons of the churchyard

Have seen unblessed things;

Ground no longer hallowed

Has sprouted new graves

Lucina Williams was found dead at 6:27, on a frosty November morning, in Salem, Massachusetts, in an old, weathered cemetery. She lay in the befouled hollow of an aged grave, her glassy eyes rolled back, convulsing in agony. And yet her face was twisted in an unnerving smile, disturbingly serene. She had died in a state of euphoric bliss. Happiness so unnatural, so completely grotesque, that her face had to be covered up in pictures; for the elderly gravekeeper’s state of mind. He had seen many awful things in his lifetime, but none so horrifying as this.

Lucy was buried in that very same churchyard. Her lonely grave untended to, unloved. No mourners or flowers were ever present, for she was disowned for some despicable deed the family would not speak of. Only that they were certain, absolutely so, that she had been taken in by the Devil; Lucy was pure evil.

The child she had given birth to, a pale, frightful specimen, was later christened Abigail. Her conception profane, her birth unnatural, her existence forbidden. A daughter of the grave, a creature born outside of God’s holy light. The wretched girl began her unfortunate life in shame. In the ever looming shadow of her mother’s sins, unable to redeem herself. A blight unto all; the final curse of a dying witch.

(The art of veneficium, Lucy learned from Him.)

Blasphemy made flesh. Ungodly freak, dark defiler. She poisons the family tree. The cuckoo in the nest. The snake in the grass. The fatal tumour.

The holy Father, not her Father, condemns her to eternal damnation, for rotten children do not deserve heaven. To plead for salvation is hopeless; there is no God who could give her purity back.

She simply should not exist.

(All of this, she has been told.)

Her family are repulsed by her, instinctively, but compelled by unknown forces to shelter her. They die one by one, at her unwilling command.

… But as a young girl she lives in merciful innocence. She knows not what she does, lost in her world of make believe. Strange yet wondrous creatures speak to her in the darkened night, as she dreams of flying amongst the glittering stars. Waving silver wands, casting magic spells. Dancing with dryads under the pale moonlight, enchanted by faeries; elven beings only she can see.

For if anyone were to turn their uncursed eye upon such abominations, madness would destroy them.

(Her older cousins, aged seven and eight, refused to speak of the incident. They refused to speak at all. Until death.)

Descendants of a clan

That usurped maternity

Hear whispers in their blood;

This summons of their fathers.

In a loveless home, she yearns for love, as all God’s children do. But cold hearts yield only emptiness, and hateful whispers spur her on to look elsewhere.

The graveyard beckons, begs her to draw closer. An almost desperate compulsion. Homesickness. As she walks amongst decaying tombstones, she hears ghostly whispers call out, and feels wraithlike fingers comb through her hair. A spectral voice cries out for sweet nourishment; she offers it her milk to pacify.

There, in the dark recesses of the churchyard’s ancient yew tree, she begs for comfort. She lies coiled as foul, egg despoiling serpent.

(As in the garden of Eden, she is the great deceiver.)

Inside she feels the thrum of an old God’s heartbeat. It exactly mirrors her own; an inherited resonance.

So powerful is this connection, she sees in her mind’s eye the unearthly form of the Father. The yew tree His outstretched hand, their gnarled, malformed branches His fingers, toxic sap His blood, unending roots His veins from which His dark ichor pulsates.

Her fingers trace the ancient bark, recounting primordial treelore. Her blood stirs with eldritch knowledge. Visions echo from another world far back behind her eyelids and inside her mind, as the Father summons her from deep below.

(Far from God’s condemning eye.)

“Forgive me Father

For I know not what I do;

My grave beckons

As irresistible as drawing breath.”

In the old yew she sleeps and dreams of His majesty. The Underworld, home of the blessed dead. Outside of this mundane plane of existence, his shadowy domain. It is a labyrinth of catacombs, endless and unfathomable. It eternally devours itself, serpentine; the cycle of life and death unfolding. Forever.

She peers into the gaping maw of Hades, in which the Great Gravekeeper resides. He sits upon a throne of misshapen yew, a monstrosity of wood and decayed flesh, and He is wreathed in bloodsoaked thorns and cloaked in an abyssal shroud. Atop His massive head rests His magnificent Crown of Horns.

The spirits of the departed kneel before Him in worshipful devotion, their servile offerings reek foul miasma. They chant in feverish orations, invoking His accursed epithet:

(Father of The Graves. None So Vile.)

His true name is unspeakable in human tongue, yet it throbs deeply in her soul, as familiar as her own.

His countless reptilian eyes turn to watch her in curious amusement. Her body shivers, an instinctive fear. The Father observes His daughter, and in recognition, He reaches out an ashy, skeletal hand for her to grasp. It is kindly, almost gentle. Loving.

… But every time she awakes in tormented screams. Her mortal brain is seized by otherworldly forces. Inside her witchblood boils with poison. She feels unbearably empty. The hollowness is agonising; she does not belong here. But there, by her Father’s side.

(And yet, she serves a purpose here, for He would not create without reason. Between life and death, she acts as His median emissary.)

Nature abhors a vacuum

The same is true to a tomb…

A vacant grave must be filled,

For this the Father’s will.

On Hallowe’en, she prepares for the welcoming feast.

The chosen victim lies screaming on the altar, gutted in ritual sacrifice. Arterial blood fills the chalice, spilling onto her conjuring sigil. A sickly green cloud of smoke emanates from within; The Dark Ones are appeased. She murmurs incantations, praying in an eldritch language. Her Father’s tongue.

Another shrill shriek of pain fills the air as she continues the disembowelment. Unflinching, she rips through soft flesh; carving out her choicest cuts. They cry and beg her to stop, to please god stop and oh god please stop like a bleating, pathetic lamb.

(“Be quiet.” She hisses. She must have silence.)

Candles flicker, wavering in the late October wind. Thunder cracks the livid sky, wild forks of lightning split across a hellish landscape of her own design. Acid rain floods a barren wasteland, corrupting the once fertile soil and disintegrating crops to dust. There is no escape. Under His reign, all will wither.

A gaping chest wound as she extracts the heart, relishing in the final cry of a slaughtered pig. For a moment she holds it, admiring the coveted organ. Dark, warm rivulets of blood flow across her palms and through her fingers. Pure and untainted. So unlike her own.

The first time she has killed with her own hands.

(It felt good to be cruel. To eat her guilt and shame.)

She turns back to her altar, prepares the sacrament:

A black box, dripping vile fluids; her phylactery. Her shadowed grimoire, bound in dark, hard leather. Nightshade, hemlock, aconite. An hourglass of ash, pilfered from a funeral urn. An assortment of bones, human and animal. Her ritual sickle, seeped in gore and entwined in snakeskin. Objects of witchcraft.

Now joined by the heart, lungs, stomach, the entrails, the severed head and the tormented soul. All them are hers now. Her cabalistic hoard. Madness overtakes her then. It spikes in her brain like fever. She grasps the overflowing cup of blood with one pale, bony hand. And, with a decadent sigh, tips it into her open mouth. It trickles slowly into her throat. She swallows it. It tastes like copper, like iron, like death; a flavour gone sweetly rancid.

(She is without mercy. Without compassion. The Father’s will is absolute. She will sow the bitter seeds of His funeral empire and be rewarded in death.)

Sired in blasphemy

In nocturnal obeisance to rotted hearts

Filled with necrolatry

Reverse the life cycle, be reborn through death

Now the time has come. She must reap her harvest.

Autumn’s frost bites her face. A deathly chill pierces her bones, but she does not shiver. She is serene, so oddly calm in her unraveling mind. Twisted, maligned branches of the old yew tree find her again and guide her to the cobwebbed graveyard.

Under the midnight sky, the tombstones appear as a sea of desolate grey waves, blanketed in fog like a funeral shroud. In that misty gloom, she walks amidst weeping spirits. They reach out with icy phantom limbs, offering up sepulchral hymns to their unholy lich mistress, they plead for their salvation; to be granted life once again.

(For the first time she will answer their prayers.)

Tonight, she will pervert life’s sacred order. Tonight, she will defy the righteous fury of God. Tonight, the Father’s will is to be carried out, as the once dead shall be reborn from the womb of the earth and usurp the living. By His will. By her will.

A moment of silence as she contemplates the vastness of her actions now, the end result of a perfect tantrum. She remembers all the faces turned away, all that would sneer at her demise. All of the fear, disgust and hatred, eyes seething and spiteful. Their eyes. Her eyes.

Blackened slivers of ichor drip from her sickle. Her own blood, her venom. So impure, so violently cancerous. It taints the consecrated land below. Theirs. Hers.

(Its blade reflects the moonlight, pale and haunting.)

And so from her lips spills a forbidden spell. Her cursed blood is absorbed into putrid grass, where it slowly coagulates into an obsidian snake. It slithers downward, downward, downward, into the many awaiting, hungry mouths of a thousand corpses.

From below an eerie moan. Singular, then multiplied. A foul odour wafts through the air as the tombs unseal, dark fog swirling in a shadowy haze. The Underworld exhale, from the filth they emerge:

Undead victims of plague, riddled with disease, lift their filthy, maggot-infested bodies from the infected earth. A writhing mass of baleful poxflesh, leaking yellowed pus and choked with vomit. Frenzied, murderous abominations scream in rage and bloodlust, tearing apart coffin lid and shattering tombstone to dust. Withered and shambling corpses groan in despair, ravenous victims of starvation. Their mortal hunger torments them still. They salivate and froth desperately at the mouth, crying in their desire to consume flesh and suck marrow from bone; to devour utterly. The drowned are bloated, soaked in embalming fluids. Their skin is cold and their lips are blue. They are still. Lifeless, glassy eyes stare up at the evil moon. Frozen. Possessed.

(Pestilence. War. Famine. Death.)

Observing her resurrected horde, she is filled with an intense feeling of power. It is intoxicating, so alluring. She reaches up an outstretched hand, as the malevolent puppet master, and they are forced to dance for her on invisible strings. Her magic binds their souls in eternal undying servitude. Pawns of her twisted vision, ensnared in her web, bewitched by her black sorcery. They shall all be as one. Necromantic slaves. Forever in her chains.

The Witching Hour bell tolls, thirteen times, as it did on the eve of her birth. The dead surround her in undivine mass; their vile priestess. They lift her onto many decrepit, rotted shoulders, and upon her head they crown a wreath of thorns, a halo of briar and sin. Her face is white, vacant. She no longer feels pain.

Infernal legions rise. Under her command, they begin their dread march. Onward, towards the apocalypse.

(No regrets. No going back. The end has begun.)

Her tears flow freely now, her body numb with cold. She recites in hushed whispers a final invocation, one final goodbye:

“Forgive me Father,

For I know not what I do;

I leave a void to fill one,

Hear my prayers from far below…”

Once I finally get around to writing that backstory fic it’ll add more context to this one. Thanks for reading!

(Taglist: @rottent33th, @slaasherslut, @the-pinstriped-hood, @goldrose-star, @soupbabe, @vincent-sinclair-deserved-better, @solmints-messyocdiary)