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dontstareatgorgons · 5 months

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The Sheep Queen

first off, thanks to my friends for goading me into posting this. I wrote this in approx 3 hours, no I dont know how, yes I should have been doing other things.

On the edge of a medium sized town there lives a family who raises sheep, both for wool and meat. They are a large family, fairly well off. Food is valuable, as is wool when the winter months come. The family has no shortage of either. One day, in the middle of the night, the eldest boy hears knocking in the barn; this is unusual, it is fairly well known in town that when hard times hit the family will do what they can to help get people on their feet again (the homeless buy no wool, and do not spare the money for a holiday roast). The boy enters the barn, lantern held aloft, to find a girl, with hair too pale for her age, wearing dark stained rags over starved-thin limbs. "Hello" he calls softly, into the night the girl raises her head in a flash, startled like the jackrabbits in spring, but she freezes like the deer who leap the pasture fences, her red eyes reflecting the firelight the way the barn cats sometimes do, orange glow almost obscuring the way her eyes widen. Fear almost makes the boy miss the way her chest spasms with a gasp of air she does not need, a wordless surprise of expected damnation. He sees the way those firebright eyes dash to the ragged bundle resting on the hay bales prepped for feeding tomorrow.

"Wait!"

As his word splits the silence, like the crack in the old concrete dam that broke last winter, so too do her words come spilling out

"Im sorry! I'm sorry! I'll leave, please, I havent taken anything! I have not touched your sheep!"

"easy, traveller, I mean you no harm!"

This freezes her in her tracks. he cannot mistake her in this half-light, she is sure.

"Come, we have a spare room in the house. it will be more pleasant than the bale, and we have enough blood sausage to feed another mouth. If you wish to continue at evening, we will not stop you, but it does by honor a wound to leave a guest with the animals"

The girl is unsure, but in a twist of fate does follow him inside, where he sets about lighting candles and sure enough, rather than grab for stake or sword, grabs a skillet and firewood, alongside some of the promised sausage.

The noise rouses the boys parents, and his siblings, though his grandmother sleeps on. The mother sees the girl, sees the way her clothes are more torn than mended, more chimney rag than coat. In moments a hearth-warm blanket is draped upon her shoulders, a warmth she does not remember when she last felt. A warmth so different from the menace of torches and forge-metal. Surprisingly it is the father who speaks.

"A traveler, I suppose? I haven't seen you in town, lass." lying is comfortable. lying will likely not work. not with how this man's son heats naught but sausages, not with how her skin has grown as frozen as the ground beneath their feet

"Of a sort, I am not allowed to stay once found." a truth, but not the whole truth. Pray that the boy will keep her secret -pray he learned his kindness from his parents- a look is exchanged above her head. she should run… she has not eaten in months, and the sausage smells oh so good. If she doesn't eat soon she will starve anyway. and she has waited too long, she is too slow to hunt. better a stake to the heart from a kind hand than a slow unmaking rent by her own flesh

"We do not turn out guests here. it is not our way. no matter where they come from." the mother this time. a long-withered thing in her chest begins to bloom, a thing she thought dead seasons and seasons past the tension in the air is barely broken by the boy setting down a bowl of steaming sausage, the smell rising to her nose and tugging on her control. she must not scare them too badly, if she can avoid it she devours the meal with the voraciousness of the beast living in her bones somehow the only look this earns her is one of sadness maybe even pity.

"Do you have somewhere you are going?" the boy again. "....no" her face is streaked in red to match her eyes.

Another look is passed. this time not only between the parents, but to their son, and to the small cluster of young teens lingering in the shadowed hallway. a decision is made. The mother speaks first.

"Stay with us, as long as you need. The road has made you weary, child, and we have no shortage of beds. Rest here, heal up. You are welcomed. We will be here when you rise, and there is food aplenty." Ultimately it is not the girl's choice. The horizon is beginning to glow. The boy leads her to a room, clearly unused. Long ago it was likely on an exterior wall, but on homesteads like this, houses grow with the family. There are no windows. It is the best the girl has slept in years.

She wakes rested, and stronger than she thought she could be, the moon already well underway in the sky. as she creeps out to the kitchen she finds the entire family, this time alongside elders, gathered together. She trembles slightly as a breeze blows through, for it is long past the time that herdsmen retire, and even further past when elders are oft to bed. The eldest man, who must be the boys grandfather, speaks first.

"Did you sleep well girl?" she knows not what to make of this

"yes, sir, I thank you for your hospitality"

"good. eat up, there are things to discuss" the old lady, who must be his wife, reaches a weatherworn hand out to thump his shoulder

"don't scare the poor dear, she's had enough frights! come girl, sit" she motions to the empty chair at the kitchen table, one more than had been present yesterday. Again she is handed blood sausage, this time by a guileless child missing a front tooth. She hasn't seen a child up close since her empty stomach stole from her the warmth of youth as she eats, now more tempered, more careful, no longer quite as consumed as the night before, the grandfather speaks.

"I know tales of your kind, who live by the moon. You are faster, stronger, than any man can hope to be. Some call you savages-"

her grip tightens on the utensil she has been given

"but those folk call many fine people savages, so their thoughts matter little. I tell you what girl; no matter what you decide you are welcome here until your body is strong enough to continue, but if you want to stop running, I shall strike you a deal. Once you are well, you shall watch the herds in the night- we have had problems with wildlife, though you need only come wake us should something appear, and in return you are welcome among us like family. We shall feed you, house you, and look after you as our own." this seems like a dream, a luxury she almost had forgotten.

"Think on it, child, and in the meantime rest, and recover. you are safe here."

She does, in the coming weeks. her frame begins to lose the hollow gauntness, and her hair even earns back a bit of shine. weeks become months, as the cold season comes, and then goes. somehow the thought of leaving never comes to her mind. At dawn and dusk she greets the family warmly, eating her dinner with the early risers, and eating her breakfast with the night owls. Every day, without fail, she finds a bag of sausage with her name writ upon it waiting for her come midnight. The sheep themselves do not trust her much, as sheep are wont to do, but time has calmed the brave ones. Some even call to her when the rare wolf prowls the woods. It is as the harvest comes that the boy pulls her aside one eve and offers her something.

"a treat" he says. "It is harvest time, and i fear you are likely getting rather bored of the same sausage. '' Getting bored of food is a luxury she has never had, not even as a true child. He leads her to a building, on the opposite side of the house from the barn. This, she has learned, is where the family processes their animals for meat. Sitting on the edge of a bench just outside, is a jug, and a cup taken from the house. With a flourish, the boy pours from the jug and hands the girl perhaps the sweetest gift given to her since that offer of a warm bed. She drinks the rich sheep's blood, so much warmer and more filling than the sausage which has sustained her so far. He gleefully hands her the fairly large jug. she drains the entire thing, and not once does the grin leave his face. How lucky she is to have found him that night.

She stays.

Months grow to years. If you didn't know better, around harvest season she almost seemed alive, a warmth in her bones, and a flush in her cheeks. Even in the depths of winter, when no sane farmer would butcher fresh meat from his herd, she is as broad as a farm girl ought to be, and her feet dance upon the grass. The waif who stowed away in the hay stack has become another bright eyed head among the young family, playing games with the young ones and soothing late night terrors when she can. In her fifth year with the family, she marries the boy. They spoke, beforehand. They both knew she had not aged a day. They both know she never will. One winter, when his joints begin to creak, it is decided. At sundown, two pairs of red eyes open on a sheep farm in the hills. less changes than one might think.

Time creeps forth. the whole family cannot become nightwalkers; this the couple has always known. The boy's grandparents pass soon after the wedding. His parents pass some few decades later, peacefully. According to the magistrate, the boy has an illness that prevents him from coming to town. The farm is inherited by the next eldest- The parents had confided in the girl that was the plan all along. Her husband may be soft at heart, and know sheep like none other, but did not have the mind for the law and contracts like his brother. Time continues to march. Soon even the brother is taken by time. The small town has grown, now a moderate size trading hub for goods.

No one alive remembers the night a young girl took a chance on a kind boy. The night a kind boy proved a monster is not a monster at all.

The family grows, for while the original siblings are gone, they too had many children. Children taught early the importance of their uncle and aunt who live at night, their family who kept both them and the herd safe, who the family protected in turn. As the family grows, so too do the herds. A young son comes forth, and asks to join them at night. He has no love to leave behind in town, only the sheep he tends. Three pairs of red eyes open on the hill, as twilight purple fades from the sky.

So too, do both branches of the family grow as years pass. "The night shift" and "the day shift" they come to be called, first inside the family, then by the town in general. Everyone knew the house on the hill who hired night guardsmen for their sheep; no one wanted to become the poor sod up at ungodly hours, but no one ever assumed "the night shift" was anything other than shepherds who got the short end of the straw, normal people just like them. That's how the family liked it. There was but one problem; the dog problem.

It went like this; a skilled shepherd needs a herding dog, to direct and control the flock. A family of shepherds needed many, yet Dogs are only awake during the day. For a time, the Night Shift made do, but corralling a flock when predators were about was difficult, and draining. Until The Incident.

The family had always had herding dogs, bred them in fact. When the girl had first arrived, the dogs had never liked her. Animals rarely did; the sheep were simply too stupid to be scared. But then she witnessed the first litters. By then, the dogs had grown to tolerate her. It took longer than the other children, but eventually she was allowed to meet the pups. She had told the father she would frighten them. The father had handed her a pup anyway. "They are young. Everything frightens them. They will learn, much easier than the old ones." He had been right.

Now, the descendants of those very same dogs who had so distrusted her, came to beg scraps from her, and laid upon her feet when she had the rare night off (a feat becoming ever more common as the family grew. Many hands make light work, and for all she had not changed a whit since her wedding day, she was an elder, who had a hand in raising every child under the roof of the now-sprawling collection of houses in which the family lived).

For all that each canine life seemed shorter than the last, some bonded close to the lady and her husband who had been there for so long. One night, one such dog, the family's best herder, had been wandering near the woods when it encountered a starving wolf in the underbrush. The screams had split the twilight as both sides of the family raced for the commotion, only to arrive to the aftermath. The wolf was slain, its red blood staining the grass, but the lady lowered her head as her husband's favorite dog lay, its breath a weak and gasping thing as it nosed its master's cold hand. The two were no strangers to grief, this would be far from their first such loss, but her dear husband had forgotten something. In his haste out the door, the knife he had been using to whittle a wooden gift for one of the children had sliced his hand.

His lack of heartbeat had prevented him from noticing, and what passed for adrenaline masked the pain well enough. Both the lady and her husband realized the truth in unison, either too late to stop it or too curious, as the dog lapped at the weeping wound. He felt it before she, but they both knew what it meant. They waited, as the great furred chest finally went still. The rest of the family began to disperse, to leave their elder to mourn his oft-companion, but it was as they began to turn away that twin shocked gasps arose from little-used lungs, drawing attention to the sudden hacking cough, expelling viscera onto the ground, the chest ceasing to rise and fall even as the legs levered it upwards and towards its fellow cooling corpse. Teeth and tongue lapped at tacky red, and the beast ate its fill, before its head rose and a deep howl breached the sky.

The townsfolk say the nightwatch must have bred herders to wolves. The superstitious claim they tamed demons Only the family know that the best of the dogs they rear will outlive even their children, for the nightwatch are not true shepherds without a team of dogs at their sides.

If you visit that farm, in that no-longer-so-small town, you will see a pack of dogs gamboling about. Others yet sleep, some sprawled in the daylight, others tucked away in beds or the barn. Some are odd things- they seem too intense, too knowing. Some swear they have seen the same dog decades apart. All run together, until a whistle splits the pack. All run together, when a howl shakes the earth. no one has ever heard tales of bandits in those hills. The wise know that just means none survive to tell the tale. The wolfpack of the hills goes quiet. The hounds chorus takes their place. Oft, the night shift chose their hounds.

Sometimes, the hounds choose their masters. Often it is the children who look after the pups, in spring, their parents too busy with lambs. Often, the older children chose a member of one such litter to be their companion during the day. One such boy poured his soul into his friend, who was naught but a step behind the boy for years. The little boy became a man, and his lifelong friend became the undisputed best, first of the litter, then of the pack. But age comes first for those of four legs, and soon aching joints threatened to send the man's shadow from the fields. One festival night, when all the family came together to share stories and merriment, the man was approached by a distant cousin of sorts, a man who looked only a few years older than himself but whom in reality likely helped raise his grandfather, spoke to the man.

"Your hound is aging, he is set to retire this year. He is skilled enough to be one of us, if you and he would allow it. The change would heal him of his ache, but only so long as it is fairly new. Consider it, and find me if you assent" A challenging proposition. He would lose his friend to the night, no longer living the same life, able only to connect in those stolen moments bookending the day- but to refuse, and he would lose the being who saw him through his growth entirely. In the end it was barely a choice at all.

His dog is dead, the heartbeat twin to his has stopped. It aches, in his chest, where that second heart should be. His work is awkward, stilted as he learns to command another. No one can replace his soul made flesh. The day is exhausting, as he trudges home, to his bed which was so difficult to leave. When he pulls back the covers, his hand brushes cold fur, and the man smiles, bittersweet.

"stolen all the heat again, old friend?" A blur of pure darkness leaps up, and a cold tongue laves sun-warm cheeks. "i'll be sure to have it warm for you in the morning, dear" A whistled tune splits the sky. Red eyes turn to look back, a silent goodbye. The mans dog is dead.

So goes their life, connected in parts for thrice as long as they were connected as a whole, yet still do they sleep on the same sheets, just like a boy with his pup. A tether both broken and unbreakable, indomitable in strength. The man's joints too grow stiff. His nephews and nieces know what this means, they all know that time is coming for him. Just not in the way most would assume. He approaches The Grandmother, a woman legends have immortalized as the Sheep Queen of the hills. She snuck him candy whenever he was too sick to go into town with the other children, back when he was little. Before he can even speak, that festival night like so many years ago, she smiles at him.

"I know what you seek, child. Your offer accepted, our help freely given, but I must deny you one thing." His heart becomes as cold as that old void in his chest, a void partially filled, but painted with longing. "for another wishes the honor. Like calls to like, after all." Her voice rises over the wind- "Welcome, child of dawn, to the twilight. Join your soul across the veil, we welcome you with open arms!" Confusion graces his face as the customary cheer goes up, until familiar weight rests upon his knee, a weight he has felt every morning and every night, yet misses keenly every day. In mere hours, that cold place between his ribs is full. It is not warm- it never will be again, he knew that from the beginning. But it is no longer shards of sharpened ice. Now, it is the pleasant coolness of freshly washed sheets in summer. The playful rush of white rapids, urging him forth to greet the stars.

The man's dog is dead. But so is he. And as he smiles and laughs with friends new and old, his heart is at peace. They say the sheep queen of the hills is a goddess. They say she is a demon. Most say she never existed at all- But sheep are still reared in those hills, in the hands of a family older than the roads they tread, tended by herdsmen and hounds alike. And if a merchant sees a flash of too-bright teeth during an early morning delivery, or a lost child is returned home in the night telling stories of bright eyed doggies who carried them past all danger in the night, yet had to go around the creek not through, well, sometimes minds played tricks, and sometimes children told stories. And when men came asking for monsters, none could be found here, only neighbors, and the animals with which they spent their days.

#short story #fiction #original fiction #this is 3.6k words long and I wrote it in 3 hrs HELP #vampire #vampire dog #a wholesome take on vampires #redefining a monster

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