- May 20, 2023
- 108
- 31
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TRIGGER WARNING: descriptions of mild rot/gore, bones, and death; religious imagery; mental instability
NOTE: this oneshot may or may not remain true to cygnetstare's backstory, depending on later decisions made about it.
this is backwritten to her apprenticeship; she does not remember this or the events leading up to it currently.
NOTE: this oneshot may or may not remain true to cygnetstare's backstory, depending on later decisions made about it.
this is backwritten to her apprenticeship; she does not remember this or the events leading up to it currently.
She's here. Two paws stop before a small tangled forest of blooms, the greasy yellow moon casting its dim and filthy light over one milk-clean paw and one black as the roiling muck underfoot. The mud seeps around Cygnetpaw's every pore, twisting maniacally about her sin-stained paws and streaking them with a tangible guilt, a damnation written in the oily earth, tugging with every step. Stay here, it seems to whisper, weaving a song of insanity around her head in a pagan crown, begging in a high-pitched wail, screaming; stay forever, join these rotting gods in their swamp palace. The dead know no different, nothing other than the greasy stomp and clash of the earth's oldest army in the grave; how can a fallen god know of their damnation? The mud begs her, entices, whispers terrible secrets velvety as mossy bones into the flesh shells of her ears; suddenly the weight of her flesh hangs heavy on her bones, the slow crooked pathways of blood are a submerging river.
Join us, it whispers to Cygnetpaw, You can hide, you can run, but what you kill is yours. Finders keepers, losers weepers; the prey of the fox roils thick in its belly, and how different are you? You've killed here. The blood of your guilt stains this soil and it wants, it craves; you'll be back. Murder is silent, but the grave is patient: does the penitent not confess? Does the criminal not writhe on death's banquet table under 2500 volts and still the blood of the innocent will stain his lips into the grave? Oh yes, you can bury me anew and say your repentance, it whispers in a horribly familiar wheeze, but the grave will remain; you can pull at the bones but the earth will hold on to that last, noxious cell.
She doesn't even know she's clutching her head until they feel the muck paint their fur, claws pricking the pale flesh in repentant crosshatches; roiling pink eyes fix in their sockets on that dirty cheesy grin of the moon: what are they doing? Talking to the swamp? They've burnt enough moonlight trekking to the edge of this swamp, and their night's heathen work not begun, the earth-blood not yet ripped forth from the arteries of death to reveal its pulsing ivory heart. Cygnetpaw's bony legs tense, tendons standing out against dark fur like chains of flesh and blood; her teeth snap together in an ivory etching against the burning heat of this death-drunk act, a pale and horrible grimace. The apprentice's paws plunge into the yielding rot of the earth, pulling at the fatty wound she opens in muck; flowers twist about her mud-splattered feet, twining into gravesnakes, cleaving the earth into a yawning and willful maw, sucking her paws in with every horrible squelching shovel. The earth pulls her in, the siren song of the grave; death is not content to idly surrender its greasy secrets, to sit back with a full belly; no, it pulls Cygnetpaw's fur down with the leaden weight of the dead.
Cygnetpaw doesn't know how long she digs, refuses to raise her sinful eyes to the turned cheek of the high priest in the sky, to watch the pagan progress of her dark work in the irreverent light of the hateful moon; she trusts in faith alone to keep a lone hunter from stumbling upon her midnight work at the edge of the marshes, more for their sake than her own; this earth should receive another nursing of blood if someone were to come upon her as she goes about this silent battle with the hated earth. By luck or by the horrible hand of death's dealings in fate, no lonely wanderer finds this ungodly tableau of the unforgiving swamp. She doesn't know how long she digs, but eventually she gets her treat for this horrific trick; the earth finally yields its bloody crop, the fruits of her private hellscape.
The rent and butchered meat of the swamp turns loose an oily stench, the richly awful smell of the mouldering and hidden dead, the backroom shame of the buried child; it is worse than the smell of rot, the smell of bone: it is the horrible stench, the unavoidable mist of guilt. Cygnetpaw reaches in, clasps their paws about this idolatrous offering to the reaper like a prayer; the horrible moss-slicked sprawl of bones, fat and twisted and as hatefully jaundiced as the stinking and pockmarked moon, horrifically yellow and greasy against the muddy lily of her paws. The bones are pulled from this gushing thing, this ripped cavity of spoilt innocence in the earth, this heretical mockery of a grave; the rank and endless anatomy of her guilt. What you kill is yours forever; you can wash it from your paws but the siren song will never end, the hypnotist's eye of the invisible blood, your victim's hateful final gaze will be etched on the gravestone of your mind; rest in peace, Cygnetpaw. She got what she had coming, didn't she?
Bonelessly, Cygnetpaw piles these stinking offerings in a godless heap onto flat bark, torn careless from the forest of her sins, the personal hell of the marsh; the opening crypt of her life, her personal Lazarus creeping forth in every stealing finger of moonlight wrapped around the jury of trees. Faintly, then louder and louder, the slow toneless sound of the guillotine falling, the screech and grind of her mind halts; she wonders with a horrible glee if she's losing her mind. Can you feel your sanity slipping away like so much water in an unholy font, funneled away in a repentance? Can you feel the clean snap of the daily machinations, the piercing of that precarious barrier between the sane and the insane?
But, no; the blessed unreality of madness does not fall upon the short stage of her life like that biblical curtain, concealing the smoking altar of reality. The mad grimace lurks unflexed in the muscles of her face, the rank tears of insanity bead unfallen behind her eyes—the bubbling and endless shrieks remain in her throat, the baptismal font stays full of its oily blessing. It turns on itself, wrapped like a stinking revelatory sackcloth; blotting out the sparkling and appealing sun of reason, of innocence unable to be restored. Cygnetpaw wants faintly to shriek, to protest, to scream in the way an innocent would: I was just a kit! I was just a kit! I didn't know what I was doing! She does not; the thick silence of guilt hangs under the greasy moon, and a mud-smeared form turns: the path to WindClan's graveyard is long, the path of the damned approaching the noose longer.
art by harriers on dA. thank you!
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