Boyhood

Another age-gray piece fell from Omen Owl’s feather; Najwa had counted them. Every day another sorrowful barb lost since they met; now, it was scant more than bare. She knew, by the troubling ways he sometimes cradled lost fibers, or plucked them free: he believed, when the feather was naught but a marbly quill, that he would die.

“You were a boy,” she said. In his ichor-shot gaze he pondered that honor-feather of his tribal past.

“Not after that.”

But she saw a boy there still, wretched-skinned, wronged and weary. Nineteen was still a boy; nine was not a man.

Rat Queen

Across her hundred flea-sores swarmed countless pale paws and storm-black eyes. A vermin host unending weaved through her fingers and dug scars in her skin. Rot-soft fangs gnawed her cheeks; they lapped up the fetid milk of deep and aching pimples.

Hair, once treasured like shining onyx, envy of warlords’ daughters, now hung tattered and gray like jute, and shed in anxious chunks to give feast to the vermin. Her chest, once supple and gentle-thewed, had become bony and pot-bellied. This was her ruin-strewn wallow, far from judging eyes. Here, she claimed her undying throne, as squalid queen of rats.

/Speaker/

From his ribbon-tattered lungs came coarsely a xaeic shriek. Like the wail of a baleful comet, his pleas streaked the cosmos, beckoning those ruinous arks. To distant star emperors he cried, begging them: set their black and icy sail for unblessed Kyn.

He summoned down their akashic weapons, their grievous rays of regret, their meridian-crushing lances made of severed possibility. He danced and chanted for their arrival, above the sky like nearer planets, from which they would rupture Kyn into volcanic shards. And show no mercy to the world that killed him.

For this, he would commit a trillion suicides.

The Body Remembers

In the creek’s murmuring mirror, he considered his eyes, now striped with stark and ichorous veins. He could feel their bulging with every blink, and tears clumped between them like cobwebs. With every newer, bluer fold that gathered beneath them, a new foreignness to his reflection.

There was no coolness nor relief on his blackened, rotting fingers, when he dipped them deep to scatter away his image, and feed it in irrecognizable pieces to the dumb-mouthed catfish bumbling in the water.

Onto the brookside, in brackish and skin-sloughing webs, he coughed up her kiss. Into the puddle, a feather’s thread.

Pestilence

A clash of splinter-spitting axes ended when Dead River’s cheek was split by a crooked strike. The victory in his slayer’s stark eyes turned to terror, and the war-crying throat to sickness. Instead of blood, black bile sludged down Dead River’s cheeks, cut by the woeful tracks of tears.

Flies— black, tumorous fistfuls— wrenched free from their porous nests, and wriggled out through Dead River’s slopping wound. Gasps and dust devils were drowned out by their cacophony. Panicked maggots splashed in his bloody puking-puddles.

And his slayer kicked his pleading hands away, to damn Dead River to his inner flies.