#who can defend others briefly but as soon as he stops moving he solidifies into stone | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kriegisms · 6 years

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100 Prompts - 001Birth

Inspiration Playlist: x x x

She isn’t long for this world.

She knows it as well as she knows herself. Knows every tract of land, every curve of the terrain. It is her, after all. Everything she is, everything she stands for. Or stood for; what she was and is has begun to change, she can feel it in her gut the shift of power over what she perceives as her place, her lands. Lands she has put herself on Death’s very threshold to protect, people that will soon no longer be hers.

Protect it from the creature who lies not far from her own broken body. Torn apart by this monster in human skin, the body lying within reach, his own sword sticking from his chest and a blood-curdling smile still plastered across his face. His eyes are still open, gleaming with his wrought carnage across their glazed unseeing surface.

They called him ‘War’. He was bigger than she was, likely due to his ever-imposing and brutal presence on the world. Maybe she wonders what will happen now that he’s dead, slain by her hand driven by rage and maternal instinct to guard. Will another take the mantle? Will there always be such a beast in this world that causes malady and destruction?

He inflicted heavy damages of his own, to be perfectly honest. Her body is torn, her ankles and parts of her lower legs splintered beyond repair. How she stood to face him after he broke her is a mystery she quietly and briefly entertains herself with before a final fleeting thought of how stained and torn her once-pretty dress is, smeared in dirt and gore. It was a gift to her from her people and she has sullied it.

Any semblance of structure is lost to her, punctuated with a wet cough, her arms shakily holding her lofted giving way and collapsing. Her mane, flowing and cloud-like, drops like dead vines to the earth alongside her, no longer wisping of its own accords. The final breath is a death rattle, the world fades to black and she finds peace in it.

The heartbeat is not expected, deep and pounding. Painful.

The ether is lost in a flash, a brilliant white light flaring across glazed eyes striking her back into wakeful agonizing life. Or something akin to it, at any rate.

Another thump in her chest, more forceful than the last. She gasps at it, her lungs greedily gulping in as much air as they can from being rendered inert. A wet wheezing hack erupts from her, her body starting to activate long before her mind does. It will be some time before she realizes on any conscious or subconscious level where she has been and come back from.

One hand claws at her chest, gripping it as another heartbeat thumps, threatening in its tenacity to kill her again before she has a chance to fully revive. They come more frequently but no less ferocious. Her existence reignites around this pulse, driven by solid instinct alone to push herself up with her free arm. The foundation is shaky at best, but it holds long enough for her to stabilize herself with her other hand, dirty fingernails leaving grimy scratches in her skin, deep enough to bead dark blood just barely to the surface along her throat and upper chest.

It is a little easier to breathe without the burning, her heartbeat steadying and no longer explosive. She is stable for a second when her abdomen cramps painfully and she loses the lock on one elbow. It sends her sideways before she balances again, the loose arm pulled to put pressure on her middle.

The whimper that escapes is punctuated with a heave. She tries to hold it in, attempting to exercise some sort of primitive subconscious control, unaware of the scratched lines tracing all across her body. Blood rises like dark pearls before, with a wet tearing noise, they rip open. The shock of feeling it happen simultaneously is the final tether on that basic control and with a final heave, she empties her stomach much against her will onto the ground in front of her.

She hasn’t noticed yet that it is not actually blood that leaks from her new stripes, not even appropriate vomit. Black and oozing, staining everything it touches a sickly shade of very dark green. Her hair falls in front of her face, dripping with the same ooze, no longer voluminous. She has all of a half-second to contemplate this turn of events before the next few violent stages of the transformation happen.

It starts with a tingling sensation under the skin, from head to toe. Curious, until the muscle in the areas under and around the striping wounds bulk and tighten, wrenching a cry of surprised agony from her gasping maw. The feeling of her teeth growing and shifting in their places makes her tighten her jaw against it, clenching the now-fanged jaws together as though the pressure will make them stop.

The sight is indescribably hideous, a mass of vague human shapes and little semblance to the being it was before. Beneath the mass, she still holds what she can only assume was what she was before. She feels everything in this space between space, a tiny hole between the body she was and the ever-shifting blob that is pushed into its place.

The stripes begin to heal, knitting grotesquely together as she continues to leak ichor from every opening and orifice, her watering eyes dripping black tears behind a veil of oily tendrils attempting apparently to melt into the ground around her and take her with it.

With the healing striped scars comes something more pressing. The splintered and shattered ankles and legs are slowly pulling themselves back into alignment. It hurts like fiery coals have been injected into her skin and when they are nearly done, only then does some conscious thought manage to tell her that something has gone horribly wrong in this process, but it doesn’t know what exactly is wrong.

The tingling sensation returns, behind her eyes before the migraine comes. Strong enough to blind her, to make her feel dizzy and nauseous again, her arms wrapped at her middle in an attempt to keep herself from throwing up. It lasts for a fair while, she loses track of how long exactly. It ebbs out like a slow tide, the last appropriate precursor before the blob of goop pulls and shapes and solidifies itself back into her.

Besides the staining on her skin, her hair is the only remnant of the ooze that she simply is, a metamorphic beastly creature that has no one face it can use. She will mostly keep the face she can remember and knows the most familiarly. Her mane, however, will be no more cloud-like and wispy as fog, but oily in its constant movement and as black as the void that spawned it.

She thinks individually, fully aware of what is happening when the main ordeal is over. Her brain functions enough to barely croak out her name as though afraid she will forget it. She thinks in maneuvers and movements, strategies and tactics and equations. She thinks like a general and will perform like a soldier. It is the only thing she knows now.

It all comes flooding back to her from before her change and for the first time she can actively remember, she hates. Her land and country are no longer hers. She feels empty and alone and now she hates. Hates the horror War, lying nearby, his body growing cold and grey and starting to crumble to ash and dust beginning with his extremities. Hates the Polish monarchy what sent little Germanic crusaders to sweep in from the south at the behest of this monster she has slain. Hates that she no longer feels her earth, her people. It leaves her feeling none but pure, raw rage.

She would cry bitter tears here, would declare revenge on those responsible for what she is now. Except now she doesn’t know why. Like a flash, it is there and then gone and she remembers none of why she feels this cold empty loneliness. She merely assumes this is what she is supposed to feel at any given time, and accepts this and the feeling of wrath that is residual of her final thought.

She concentrates on who she is, but draws a complete blank. She no longer remembers the name she had before, but a new one flashes like bright red letters:

War

War. Her name is War. This is the name she is bestowed, the identity she remembers.

She tries to stand, to find where she belongs. There is a sharp jolt of burning agony up her legs from her ankles, causing her to fall again with a sickening crackle. She looks down at them, bared from beneath the torn skirts of the destroyed dress to see a subtle disparity between her lower legs and the ankle joints. The bones reformed, but the main break did not line up correctly. A purse of her lips, she knows now that the misalignment is permanent to her.

Unable to move, unable to remember what it is she is supposed to be doing or was doing, and feeling fatigued, she curls up where she is. It isn’t long for her to drift silently off into a dreamless sleep, hoping as she leaves the waking world that the nap will help her remember what her purpose is.

She is awakened by the sound of pounding hooves. Her eyes open slowly to take in her surroundings to determine if she needs to defend herself or not. The corpse next to her is hardly anything but moistened grey ash, piled around a sword stuck in the ground. But that is not what catches her attention besides passing glances.

Three massive horses are circling her continuously, going around and around and around her. Their riders are like something out of a horror story, told around a campfire by travelers to both ease the time and warn others of what lurks in the dark beyond the firelight.

One is grey and waxy, the perfect masque of ill. One misses their bottom jaw. One is hardly a skeleton with skin stretched on it.

The horses are not normal either; an emaciated white horse, a dark brown one with bright green eyes, a grey one with gleaming eyes of fetid copper. All of them fly a tattered black cloth from the back of their saddles, rogue tendrils and threads clawing futilely at the air as the three continue their endless circling.

Just beyond them is a larger circle of other horsemen, a normal-looking human cavalry of fair size, all flying the black cloth from saddles and bridles. The tack and armor on these horses vary from horse to horse. This is no standard cavalry. Unlike the three of the inner circle, these stand still. Or as still as a horse can stand at rest. She would be lying if she said she wasn’t curious to their presence.

New movement draws her attention forward, toward a stocky little man of dark skin and pale gold smiling eyes, almost as striking as the massive horse he leads. The beast’s head is trying to toss against the grip on its bridle’s chin strap and in lieu of not having such freedom, it ripples through its body instead. It is purely black, save for the flashing red eyes. An indeterminate breed, monolithic yet elegant. When it bares its teeth, it displays prominent canines in its upper and lower jaws.

The man stops in front of her and there is silence for a moment before he offers his free hand toward her. She takes it tentatively and he pulls her up to sit on her knees, but no further.

“You should probably mount your horse.” he tells her in a hushed tone.

She shakes her head, not even questioning why she understands him perfectly. Her voice is still rough, cracking from disuse. “I cannot stand. I think I hurt myself.”

He looks over her shoulder to where she favors her broken ankles and his lips purse behind his magnificent beard of greying red thoughtfully. He looks over his shoulder, lets go of her to wave a few others in the outer circle to him. A couple dismount, a few others in infantry uniforms run between the tight ring of horses.

“Help the commander mount her horse.”

She wonders why the rank for someone who has woken with no recollection of anything but her name and condition before she is suspended between hands and placed precariously on the saddle; the horse is surprisingly still during mounting. The soldiers run back to their positions as she takes the reigns offered her by the handler who greeted her and it is almost like magic. With someone on its back and the reigns in their hands, the massive beast becomes easy to control. Which is a good thing, considering she is unsure how to handle something as volatile as its display showed earlier. As if on cue, the other three horsemen circling slow down and file in behind her.

“We will have to help you with those ankles. We’ll head for Damascus; their metalsmiths are some of the finest. Wouldn’t hurt to get you a better saddle too.” the greeter says.

She shifts in the saddle a bit, aware that it was made for someone at least twice her size. The one before perhaps.

The man walks toward the sword sticking out of a pile of ash on the ground, pulling it up and sliding it into a hidden sheath at the left-front of the saddle before looking up. “I am Balthazar of Midian. I’m one of your generals for the Legion.”

“My name is...” She pauses, trying to remember her name. All that flashes is the one word, the concept. The idea. Surely, she has something different to offer...

At her confused silence, Balthazar picks up the slack. “You are War.” he assures, taking hold of the stallion’s bridle again and leading her and the others off toward the east. “You have much to learn of your new purpose.”

#100 Prompts #001 #Birth #this needed some repost

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