a ritual (p)
Jan 29, 2015 23:36:01 GMT -5
Post by spook on Jan 29, 2015 23:36:01 GMT -5
ONE BY ONE THEY FOLLOW ME
LAUGHING, DROWNING IN THE SEA
LAUGHING, DROWNING IN THE SEA
Morrigan drifted through the verdant morning, listening to the insatiable wind howling as though possessed through the trees. It didn’t trouble her—the storm’s bestial wrath had begun to subside. She’d felt it this morning when the abstruse change had awakened her, stirred her from sleep like a pair of gentle hands on her shoulders. The wind maintained its fierce dominion over the mountains, hushing through the canopy of the stripped autumnal trees. She paused every so often simply to listen, lifting her narrow head and nosing at the air rushing past her. It was—revivifying, to step out into the forest with the fecund scent of recently fallen rain in the soil, to feel the earth loamy beneath her paws again.
Dogs trembled at such demonstrative displays of nature’s destructive capacity, but Morrigan reveled at them. Every gust of wind had been a portent, every ferocious salvo of rain a greeting from the elements. She’d not had any particular purpose for traveling down the side of the mountain into its now-barren forests, but Salome tended to be a positively rioutous sleeper—thrashing, grunting, snoring—and Morrigan had tired of being kicked by her daughter while she attempted to divine the messages blowing past on fingers of wind. So she’d emerged, trodding delicately over the pile of commingled animal and human bones at the entrance to their shelter.
In a brief moment of respite, the wind canted back and the sun flashed down upon the white greyhound through the interwoven branches. It illuminated her, her fur glittering white after the enforced cleanliness perpetual rain had delivered. Morrigan squinted her eyes shut and almost smiled, stretching her hind legs out far behind her and arching her back, an odd juxtaposition of hideous disfiguration and elegance. Her sundry scars lit pink beneath the brief sun—all the motley wounds she’d ripped into her own hide over the years almost beautiful against the pure pearl-white of her fur.
And then the wind resumed without surcease, ripping a bank of desultory clouds over the sun. A patter of rain began again, until around her the woods echoed with the sound of it. Morrigan blinked, then placed one forepaw out a pace in front of her and dug a shallow indent in the soil. She relinquished her loose hold on a small bone she’d carried in her mouth—it dropped into the moist earth soundlessly. Without hesitating, Morrigan swung her head around to her right shoulder—a long, livid half-healed scab ripped away at the behest of her tearing fangs. She grimaced—half pain, half pleasure—to feel the blood again drooling down her fur.
She turned, allowed the blood to wind down her leg and drip into the pit she’d dug, onto the bone.
“Protect us,” she whispered, an ancient hoarseness to her voice. Absently, she watched the blood as it descended.