Sent y'all my donation! Wrote some character drabbles for fun for the two days I missed. Warning for a bit of blood on Shattered if anyone reads these.
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-Flight
The pirate ship sailed smoothly through the night, safe from storms and the ravenous, churning waves its crew had faced only days before. Most of the crew slept now, only a few awake to direct the ship and keep lookout for nocturnal terrors. Its
captain also did not sleep, finding his dreams interrupted by things too old and hungry for living souls to face.
He leaned over the bow of the ship. The moonlight danced across his skeletal form, the black ichor seeping from within seeming to sparkle in its splendor. He hadn’t been able to truly shut his eyes for a long time, but he sighed heavily and felt as if he had done so anyway, comforted by the cold light of the stars guiding them.
For a long time he stayed as such, listening to the waves kiss the ship so gently, perhaps trying to lull them to sleep before the hard journey ahead. He knew what would come. The crew did not, and telling them would be akin to asking them to write their own epitaphs.
“Why don’t you fly away?”
The voice wasn’t a thing of flesh and life; it was composed of northern winds and rancid meat, some long-dead creature whistling an imitation of sound through its bones. A hyena’s mimicked laughs were more whole than anything this creature would ever utter.
It grinned at him, long hair dripping and sliding across the ship’s clean boards. A trail of slime marked where it had climbed over the side of the ship.
“Be quiet.” Lichas refused to look at it. Staring would give it a sense of satisfaction, it would indicate that he was
bothered, and that would not do.
“O-ho, you don’t say that I’m wrong? Fly. Abandon them.” It opened and closed its skeletal jaws when it spoke, but they snapped sharply together like a hatchling’s finger puppet. Not like a real thing speaking.
He forced the rising anger out of his voice. “I told you to shut up.”
“Feed me.”
With a quiet hiss, wary of disturbing the crew, he drew his cutlass and swung it in a motion so fluid that it appeared invisible. It stuck in the creature’s ribcage and it laughed, teeth clicking and air whistling from its bones with sharp, off-key notes like a broken instrument. When he retracted the blade, chunks of ice dislodged and scattered around them.
Red eyes burned uncomfortable images into his own when they locked gazes. “I’ll crack their bones and harvest them like the rest. And you’ll let me.”
“Get off my ship.”
“Just like the rest. You won’t stop me.”
Snarling louder, Lichas spat, “Are you forgetting who’s captain here? Leave my ship, demon, or I’ll drag you back to the Icewarden myself!”
It vanished from sight, but its cackling remained in his head; whether this was an actual sound or merely a construct, he had no idea. The moon and stars twinkled their judgment down on him. Flight didn't seem like such a bad idea under their pressure. Find a new life.
The fallen ice crunched beneath his boots, a reminder of the physical threat looming over them. And, with the expression of someone lost in a labyrinth, he retreated to his quarters, leaving the sea's cold judgment for another night.
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-Dream
“Most creatures don’t have dreams, actually. It seems shocking to those of us who do, but I understand them. There’s a certain beauty in just surviving and experiencing the current world. Why waste that with looking up when you could bury yourself in something sweet?”
Resting in a field of flowers, daisies and coneflowers and enough honeysuckle to produce a scent comparable to love,
Suht held a wilting daisy between his claws, gentle with the delicate child. He stared at it with a look of absolute, doe-eyed endearment, the setting sun illuminating the intricacies of its dying petals.
He breathed in the honeysuckle air and sighed out his own sickly miasma. “Please don’t have dreams, sweetheart. You feel the wind on you, the warmth of the sun? Make sure you do. Please feel them.”
The flower did not respond, as it certainly wasn’t a magical or sentient variety of flora, but he wasn’t waiting for answers. His moments of silence were filled with thoughts, both light and dark, sickly and heavy and mostly things he didn’t want to live inside his own head.
“I wish…” he murmured. “I wish I didn’t have to think. I wish my head wasn’t filled with thought. Imagine only experiencing, never dissecting or recalling or planning. Just. Experiencing. Like you, right now. Even death is beautiful to you, I must think. There’s good with the bad.”
The flowers around his daisy had also wilted, though not as fiercely. They were not wilted when he arrived; they were so stubbornly healthy that it would take a whole clan of dragons to tear them from the ground. Not even winter would kill them entirely. His daisy, too, bad been stronger than anything the world could throw at it.
“I don’t want to dream,” he whispered. “Dreams are the routes through which hope dies. I don’t want hope either, nothing like that. I just… I just want to live. And experience. But no thinking.”
The flowers brushed gently against him when he cried. He cried often, and it offered a release from the burden of thinking when the experience of losing his heart overtook his ability to process anything else. And when he opened his eyes, blinking away the wetness, his daisy had crumbled into nothing. The flowers around it were rotting as well, strewn across the soil in cloying heaps, and every last flower in the field remained still in death. Those outside the field had already begun to wilt.
The threat of dreams burning like daggers thrust in his heart, he moved on.
---
-Shattered
He does not remember the name of the burning in his chest. When he tries, he recalls the sensation of tearing, flesh separating from flesh, the terrible chill of something missing within him. It drives him to scratch at the spot like a mad dog until a droplet of blood pokes from beneath his hide.
“Oudem. Are you ready?”
His guardian,
Atrox, looms over him, disinterested in his charge’s fresh injury. His dark eyes broadcast his boredom, and one claw is twitching with irritation while he waits for the wildclaw to speak.
Oudem stretches his wings and limbs, shaking the stiffness from his bones before answering, “Yes, let’s go.”
Without giving him a moment more, Atrox is backed out of the room and striding down the hall. Oudem follows with long paces to match the larger dragon. The halls here are gorgeous, carved from white, no doubt expensive stone and accented in gold. The rest of it, silk drapes and carpets and scattered furniture, has been colored in the rich crimson of their mother deity.
As they travel, Atrox spares a single remark: “Get stronger.” Neither care for a reply.
The destination is a room decorated the same as the halls. There’s a number of comfortable furniture pieces facing a fireplace, and the portraits on the walls are of the Plaguebringer and various figures unfamiliar to anyone not hailing from this particular kingdom. Red is by far the dominant color here, from the carpet to the curtains to the
wildclaw bleeding out all over the hearth.
The red and gold wildclaw doesn’t acknowledge their presence. Atrox sprawls across a guardian-sized divan and closes his eyes, while Oudem steps forward and examines the wildclaw. There’s a few chunks taken from his neck that are flowing with blood, then another huge bite taken out of his leg and too many gashes across his wings and the rest of his hide. An arm dips into the blood and tastes it: remarkably untainted, and that’s a
problem which he is here to cure.
“Venator, look at me,” he whispers, still leaning close. “Open your eyes.”
He obeys, the responding eye a mere golden slit at first until Oudem is faced with two burning suns. They’re accusing him, the suns
know something and they’re accusing him of terrible things and dear Plaguebringer he doesn’t like the way it brings forth the itching.
Venator snaps out of nowhere, golden fangs buried deep into Oudem’s throat;
but before this happens a hand has intercepted the furious maw, holding it shut with more strength than this scrawny wyrm should have wielded. Another hand touches Venator’s face, gentle, and two more are rubbing lazy circles against the cavities of his throat. The wildclaw looks more murderous than a childless mother and yet Oudem only croons, “It’s okay. We’ll make it okay.”
He doesn’t look into Atrox’s direction, knowing the guardian wouldn’t offer a claw of assistance even if asked. When he releases the wildclaw it collapses in a weary heap, and Oudem places his foot on the muzzle. The wings are too injured to be used as weapons at this point, and he’s not terribly worried about rebellion anyway.
“Tear my head out,” Venator gasps at last. “I want you to.”
“Why is that?”
Tail twitching, too weak for proper thrashing, Venator wheezes, “I can feel them. They’re digging holes in my head, this isn’t- There’s no constraints. I want out. Get them out. I need to be me, I’m not
them, stop letting them be me! I-”
“Ah,” Oudem says. He leans down and stretches a hand to stroke the gaping wounds, exploring the opening into Venator’s throat. “Poor wyrm.”
“My name…”
Oudem continues, “Shhh. It’s alright. You don’t need that. I want you to focus on me. Okay? Hold on to me and we’ll fix this. Focus on my eyes. I’m looking into yours, and I’m going to wrap you soft and safe like a hatchling. Feel my claws when you breathe, I’m keeping you alive. Feel them and experience how warm they are. Imagine the blood running through my own veins, it’s warm and blessed by Mother and it’ll keep you.
I’ll keep you.”
His body is aglow with yellow sprites. They’re dancing on Venator’s hide, in his mouth, squirming inside his wounds. Oudem places a hand on the wildclaw’s head and it seems to dip inside him, the fingers touching the brain itself and the whole palm fitting neatly into the skull.
Minutes pass like hours. When Oudem retracts his limbs and the strange lights have vanished, he asks with genuine concern, “Is it better now?”
“Yes.” Dull, lifeless.
Now he urges, “What’s your name?”
“Venator.”
“And your purpose?”
The wildclaw lifts his head, his eyes pallid in comparison to the raging suns from before. “I am the Venator of the New Kingdom of Tarpeia. I seek out traitors and put an end to evil.”
From the other side of the room, Atrox stretches in exaggerated motions, mouth wide open in a yawn. “Are we done here? I’m supposed to take him to the healers...”
After he’s led back to his quarters, Oudem experiences the itching once more. His heart pulses fiercely and it feels like red hot coals burning through his organs. He wonders briefly if perhaps there are fingers in his own head, though this seems unlikely. Telling himself to request a sleeping aid later, he curls into his nest and closes his eyes, awake and undreaming. His mind still itches.
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