☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
the moral of the story is // i will gut you if i need to // i will carve my way out //with only my teeth
tw for a little bit of body horror
Say there is a monster.
Say there is a very terrible, terrible monster. A monster with shiny red eyes, like little chips of stone, and big teeth with serrated edges, and claws that are so sharp and hooked that they could tear your skin to tatters, easy as you can tear paper, if you let them sink into you. Say there is a monster. Say that it lurks in the shadows in that horrible, frightening way that monsters do, and, the moment you look away from it, it lurks a little bit closer, and the room, or the woods, or the village at night – wherever you are, when you see this monster in your peripheral vision, like something sprung from a child’s storybook -, and there’s no way for you to get away from this monster, because the world is a little bit darker wherever you look, and, wherever the world is a little bit darker, the monster can get to you. Say there is a monster, and it wants to eat you. Or maybe it keeps tricking the children, and, once they step into the range of its teeth, it swallows them whole. Or maybe the monster is all ribs, and, at night, you can hear it crying, because it is hungry, and you take pity on it, and you give it a bite to eat – but it takes you instead, and you learn that it is worthless to sympathize with something that can devour you. So say, theoretically, that there is a monster. How do you deal with it? Do you chase it into the woods with torches, and hope that you can hunt it down like an animal at slaughter? Do you let it creep close and kill it like a rabid dog, with a quick sympathy, because of course it can’t help being a monster? Do you poison it, without dignity, and let it pass in its sleep? Do you challenge it outright, and risk it tearing your throat-?
To her, those punishments all seem too lenient. (And she has never been a lenient judge.) No, you make a poor example of cruelty if you are kind – those who are unwilling to stoop have simply never risked anything more valuable than their own good reputation. Death, fortunately, is not a judge with a good reputation to uphold, so she cares nothing for mercy. She does not pity the damned.
No, she does not pity the damned - she gives them exactly what they deserve.
She perches, imperceptible, on the balcony of a building, hunched over the scene playing out below. Her bonded will be here soon, but not soon enough. No, no. But that is fine with Ereshkigal. The little girl is too hurt to accomplish what she wants. She cares too much for those dead bodies in the streets, the prodding ribs of children and the empty buildings. Ereshkigal does not. She is the tick of the pendulum, the end of things – she is more accustomed to the dead than the living. She is unconcerned with his dead, unconcerned with him.
Time swallows all evils. Crunches them between its toothy jaws. Spits them out as dust.
She thinks of what she has done, in the past, to people who she found guilty, and it makes her smile – a thing that rips, terrible, up the line of her jaw, extending past the edges of her beak, and revealing the sharp, shark-like ridges of her teeth in the process. (In the back of her head - she presses squirming, ghost-white maggots into their skin and watches them eat themselves out. Or maybe she stuffs a little lick of ever-bright flame down the cavity of their throat, and she watches, dazzled, as the bright light burns a black-rimmed hole in that soft, intimate place where their jawbone meets their neck. Or maybe she pushes them below the surface of a still, dark pool, she leaves them in that moment just before they drown – forever. No relief that comes with darkness, no air. Or maybe she rips out their tongue and devours it in front of their eyes, and then she takes their eyes, and they taste slimy and twitching in her throat, and-)
Ereshkigal envies her sisters. She would far rather be adjudicator than revolutionary, demon than bird – but, of course, she is still both.
This mortal realm simply requires that she play with her food.
She leaps from the balcony and spirals downward slowly – lazily – until she is just above their heads, her circling somehow more like that of a tiger than a bird in flight; perhaps it is the way that her red eyes catch in the light, or the way that the split of her beak upturns into a knowing smile. Carnivore, bone-eater, devourer of the dead – she still doesn’t like this body, but she likes what it means. Her wings outstretch, expanding to catch in the wind, and, like some dark specter, she lands on Bexley Briar’s shoulders, the hooks of her sharp, sharp claws hovering over her flesh – but never quite sinking into it. She flutters her wings, feathers ruffling, and pulls them in at her side, her every movement intentionally, excruciatingly slow. Her head tilts. There is a high, low, crackling sound – like something crunching inside of her throat – that builds up to a harsh screech, like metal meeting metal. She stares at the blood king. Her red eyes trail the length of his form, and she drags her tongue along the curve of her beak; it is wriggling and pink, like a worm. She spares a glance to his little pets, to the red man – who thinks he’s right, like most creatures that are wrong – and the grey girl, who thinks that she is far more frightening than she is.
The king, of course, is by far and large the most pitiful of the three. There is nothing in this world more pathetic than a man who thinks he’s won.
Her head tilts so far to the side that her neck looks broken. “Poor dear,” she says, her voice high and sickly-sweet, dripping condescension. “Poor darling.” It dips several octaves, to something low and nearly-sultry; and then she laughs, raucous and jarring, as if to some cosmic joke that the rest of the gathered figures are unaware of. Poor dear. Poor darling. Poor dear. Poor darling.
Poor thing.
@Ipomoea @Raum @Efphion @Torstein @Senna @Bexley || ah, this was a fun reply <3 sera will show up as more than a mention in the next one! ||
the moral of the story is // i will gut you if i need to // i will carve my way out //with only my teeth
tw for a little bit of body horror
Say there is a monster.
Say there is a very terrible, terrible monster. A monster with shiny red eyes, like little chips of stone, and big teeth with serrated edges, and claws that are so sharp and hooked that they could tear your skin to tatters, easy as you can tear paper, if you let them sink into you. Say there is a monster. Say that it lurks in the shadows in that horrible, frightening way that monsters do, and, the moment you look away from it, it lurks a little bit closer, and the room, or the woods, or the village at night – wherever you are, when you see this monster in your peripheral vision, like something sprung from a child’s storybook -, and there’s no way for you to get away from this monster, because the world is a little bit darker wherever you look, and, wherever the world is a little bit darker, the monster can get to you. Say there is a monster, and it wants to eat you. Or maybe it keeps tricking the children, and, once they step into the range of its teeth, it swallows them whole. Or maybe the monster is all ribs, and, at night, you can hear it crying, because it is hungry, and you take pity on it, and you give it a bite to eat – but it takes you instead, and you learn that it is worthless to sympathize with something that can devour you. So say, theoretically, that there is a monster. How do you deal with it? Do you chase it into the woods with torches, and hope that you can hunt it down like an animal at slaughter? Do you let it creep close and kill it like a rabid dog, with a quick sympathy, because of course it can’t help being a monster? Do you poison it, without dignity, and let it pass in its sleep? Do you challenge it outright, and risk it tearing your throat-?
To her, those punishments all seem too lenient. (And she has never been a lenient judge.) No, you make a poor example of cruelty if you are kind – those who are unwilling to stoop have simply never risked anything more valuable than their own good reputation. Death, fortunately, is not a judge with a good reputation to uphold, so she cares nothing for mercy. She does not pity the damned.
No, she does not pity the damned - she gives them exactly what they deserve.
She perches, imperceptible, on the balcony of a building, hunched over the scene playing out below. Her bonded will be here soon, but not soon enough. No, no. But that is fine with Ereshkigal. The little girl is too hurt to accomplish what she wants. She cares too much for those dead bodies in the streets, the prodding ribs of children and the empty buildings. Ereshkigal does not. She is the tick of the pendulum, the end of things – she is more accustomed to the dead than the living. She is unconcerned with his dead, unconcerned with him.
Time swallows all evils. Crunches them between its toothy jaws. Spits them out as dust.
She thinks of what she has done, in the past, to people who she found guilty, and it makes her smile – a thing that rips, terrible, up the line of her jaw, extending past the edges of her beak, and revealing the sharp, shark-like ridges of her teeth in the process. (In the back of her head - she presses squirming, ghost-white maggots into their skin and watches them eat themselves out. Or maybe she stuffs a little lick of ever-bright flame down the cavity of their throat, and she watches, dazzled, as the bright light burns a black-rimmed hole in that soft, intimate place where their jawbone meets their neck. Or maybe she pushes them below the surface of a still, dark pool, she leaves them in that moment just before they drown – forever. No relief that comes with darkness, no air. Or maybe she rips out their tongue and devours it in front of their eyes, and then she takes their eyes, and they taste slimy and twitching in her throat, and-)
Ereshkigal envies her sisters. She would far rather be adjudicator than revolutionary, demon than bird – but, of course, she is still both.
This mortal realm simply requires that she play with her food.
She leaps from the balcony and spirals downward slowly – lazily – until she is just above their heads, her circling somehow more like that of a tiger than a bird in flight; perhaps it is the way that her red eyes catch in the light, or the way that the split of her beak upturns into a knowing smile. Carnivore, bone-eater, devourer of the dead – she still doesn’t like this body, but she likes what it means. Her wings outstretch, expanding to catch in the wind, and, like some dark specter, she lands on Bexley Briar’s shoulders, the hooks of her sharp, sharp claws hovering over her flesh – but never quite sinking into it. She flutters her wings, feathers ruffling, and pulls them in at her side, her every movement intentionally, excruciatingly slow. Her head tilts. There is a high, low, crackling sound – like something crunching inside of her throat – that builds up to a harsh screech, like metal meeting metal. She stares at the blood king. Her red eyes trail the length of his form, and she drags her tongue along the curve of her beak; it is wriggling and pink, like a worm. She spares a glance to his little pets, to the red man – who thinks he’s right, like most creatures that are wrong – and the grey girl, who thinks that she is far more frightening than she is.
The king, of course, is by far and large the most pitiful of the three. There is nothing in this world more pathetic than a man who thinks he’s won.
Her head tilts so far to the side that her neck looks broken. “Poor dear,” she says, her voice high and sickly-sweet, dripping condescension. “Poor darling.” It dips several octaves, to something low and nearly-sultry; and then she laughs, raucous and jarring, as if to some cosmic joke that the rest of the gathered figures are unaware of. Poor dear. Poor darling. Poor dear. Poor darling.
Poor thing.
@Ipomoea @Raum @Efphion @Torstein @
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
