A permanent grin affixed to his face. A smile he couldn't undo. Too many teeth that dripped with sin.
A heart in his hand...
Bleeding and beating...
Bleeding and beating...
Pumping blood with nowhere to go.
He brought it to his lips and his tongue emerged.
The heart shuddered and sputtered...
shuddered and sputtered...
and beat its last beat.
The tongue curled around it, and to the cavern of his mouth, crowded with stalactite teeth, guided the heart inside.
He swallowed it whole.
His throat bulged as it slid down to his stomach and the heart burned in its acid.
Burned and burned and screamed as it did.
Dissolved and digested, not
"Sleep,” it said. "Sleep."The voice coiled around him, burrowing deep into his ears and nuzzling his brain.
And so he slept. A deep, inescapable, yet fitful sleep.
The voice persisted in his dreams. At times cooing, at others growling and screeching.
And then, a pair of inhuman eyes opened in the dark – glowing bright spots of light in an abyss of black.
Derek stood there, unmoving, yet somehow coming closer.
“Who are you?” He thought and the words bounced around him before fading away.
“I am the one who summoned you here.” The eyes blinked slowly, deliberately.
“Here?”
“To your s
The blood on his hand was as blue and dark as the river.
He curled his fingers around the impossible liquid. It slid between the wrinkles of his palm and dripped down to taint the water’s edge. In his other hand, he held the curved, engraved blade, Saalihn, stained with the evidence of his handiwork.
“His blood is blue,” he said to no one.
Gareth pulled out the match from his belt and struck it against a dry rock. In one swipe, the tip was lit, and he dropped it on the pile of gathered twigs at his feet.
“You knew that already,” the gruff fairy replied.
Hilt turned his hand to watch the beads of blue blood r
When Lindsay was born, Bo was there. Standing beside her mother, he was the first thing she ever saw. But he was not her father; her father stood on the other side.
Bo was there until the very moment she died.
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6
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The sun shone bright through the windows of her pink-laden room. She loved pink. And black.
“Because Bo is black,” she’d told her parents.
Her imaginary friend, they soon concluded.
“Bo is all black,” she described one night as her father tucked her in, “His skin and his hair and everything. He doesn’t talk a lot.”
Her father frowned.
“He sounds scary.”
“He
They lined up along the road without protest.
It was the first time any sect this far North had seen three daemons at once, but they knew what they were facing. Anyone who so much as passed through had word of the trio and their whereabouts -- it was just a matter of time before they made their rounds here.
“Shoulder to shoulder,” ordered the brawns of the group, a daemon who chose to take on stereotypically Russian features. Dache, he was called.
The blonde-haired-blue-eyed one, Jerid, stood beside the trio’s head with a look of mirth seemingly glued to his face. He presented the batch of victims with a wave of his hand
A deterioration into something greater,
Something worse,
Something hardened,
Something coarse.
Consider the madness a means to an end -- a shadow, a demon that must be tamed.
Control it, if you can, or it will control you.