stories-by-an-anxious-ice-dragon

[stories-by-an-anxious-ice-dragon]

today i was on the bus wiff my lesbian mogai girlfriend when this older woman with blonde hair and a cup of starbucks (of course) cofee came over and scoffed at us. she asked my lesbian mogai girlfriend to stand up so she could put her suitcase down somewhere without it getting dirty.

oh, my god. what now. i tell my lesbian mogai girleiend that she doesnt have to listen to this old karen, but she's an empath and decides to stand up anyway. so now there's this suitcase sitting next to me instad od my beautgifl mogai girlfirned and i'm just so fucking mad like what so important could be in this suitcase that it has to have a whole seat to itself while my lesbian girlfriend has to stand up for the 20 (20 WHOLE minutes) minute ride down to our chute.

that was when karen notices my lesbian mogai girlfirend's OUAT t-shit and scoffs. it was a bigger scoff tan last time, with ugliness, with hate. "i can't believe it's 2023 andyou kids are still watching fairy tales," she says. "back when i was a kid, we had real young audlt television. like full house. like saved by the bell. like dalas." i notice then her who shot JR t-shit. "and no,JR does not isn't stand for j.k rowling."

i told her that OUAT is a great tv show and that the fifth season is still way better than anything in her types of shows. it may be about fairy tales but it's also about real things. bitch.

someone else walked up. it was an older man with a cane weearing a beverly hillbillies t-shit. "she's right, you know. once, it was your tv shows that evberyone called cringe and uncool."

everyuone started looking at karen. she started fuming. she demanded i get up too, so she could sit down with her suitcase, but one of the laughing people grabbed her coffee and spille dit on her head.s calaing, hto, steamed fluid went down her flesh, boiling off every last bit of peach fuzzand going down into her shirt. she screamed. maybe you're the one who needs fairy tales, i said. and jhust like she asked, i got up from my seat, just in time to deliver a sucket punch right into her gut. she fell back into the bar behind her. everyone kept laughing. i saw the dizziness in her eyes. is aw the lights in front of her vision when the guy next to her stomped her as well. she wasn't seeing a bus full of lesbian mogait girlfreidns, she was seeing, as she lay there on the ground, her full cup of coffee now pouring down her chest, watching people start ruffling through her suitcase to see what was so apparently important, god. she was seeing the true, OUAT god.s pectres danced in front of her vision, moving her spirit back and forth in her body. your time is up. your time is up. we're taking you back. you claimed all this time that you knew everything about the world, now watch the strings of fate tugged and twisted. everyone kept laughing. the bus driver turned around and pointed at her, telling her to get up before she tripped anyone. she tried doing so, tears going down her face so salty that it seemed like she'd gotten a caramel latte instead of a mocha, but someone stomped her again. i ebt you wish you just sat down now, didn't you, instead of placing your phony suitcase next to me. what's this? you don't recognize the company name anymore? you try to read your signed name at the bottom of the coffee stained contract, but all you see is stars, the eyes of god, glaring daggers into you? how long you tried getting ahead in thsi rat race. btu your world is nothing btu a flat plane. someone could just look at everything around you and decide to crumple up up. could cut you out, paste you onto something else . outside the window, there is now a hundred lane highway. busses after busses, everyone is sitting silently, talking about their favorite tv shows, except for the bus you're in. here, someone just kicked the side of your head, swatting coffee drops out of your hair. someone just poured all the contents of your suitcase onto you. someow you mange to stand up and run run run move your feet god damn it girl just get somewhere safe think of happy thoughts happy thoughts jack and the beanstalk bah bah black sheep oh but twinkle twinkle little star and the eyes of god are still laughing at you. as you slip out the bus. you hear someone saying you're fired. who shot karen. all gather around and laugh.

my lesbian mogai girlfriend then kneels down for me, and asks me to marry her. one of the old people on the bus gives her their ring so she can do it. i'm so blushing i don't even know what to say. gosh. Maybe the world isn't so bad a place.

[stories-by-an-anxious-ice-dragon]

[Horror] Necromancer - 01

I've noticed a lot of memes saying that necromancy isn't as scary as it seems, and while I sometimes agree, I wished to try my hand at it.

CW: Gore, Bugs, Death

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The sound of the footsteps tells you that the floor is wood, though to you, it feels like long-since-dusted stone. Or perhaps, it feels like nothing at all. Perhaps it was the mantle, upon which you’d be judged by… whoever you were meant to face after their death. 

Who… are you? It’s so hard to recall anything. There’s a buzzing noise in your head that reminds you too much of the printing machines you used to work with at Marigold’s shop, and it fills your prefrontal cortex with too much white and gray noise to focus on anything. When you do focus, the only thing that sticks out to you is the cavity in your chest, where you can feel specks of flesh dripping where your ribs should be. When you curl up, and put your head to the cavity, the smell is noxious and makes your eyes water. If you could open your eyes… would you want to know what’s happening down there?

Would you want to see the cockroaches and fat beetles skittering around inside of your stomach?

The footsteps are slow, and methodical. They arrive with the swing of a door whose hinges might not have been oiled in decades… or maybe centuries. The gust of wind causes the bugs to jump. And then the door closes. Something drags beside the footsteps, scratching and sliding over the floorboards, clinking off the nails embedded in them like it was meant to be some kind of demented musical instrument. Tapping closer and closer to the pile of grayed flesh that are your remains.

Whatever it is, it nudges you. The tip of it is glassy, and it chills your spine as it drags down it. Eventually, it forces itself into the fetal curl you’ve found yourself in, and forces you out of it. The rod gets under your chin and pushes it back, until the back of your head hits the skirting of the wall. The skirting’s just as rotted as… your stomach.

Who are you…? What are you doing here?

Wait, no… it starts to come back to you. The last moments that replayed in your mind, over and over like a broken record, before you woke up in this place. You remember the hospital bed, and the white - too white - walls all around you. You remember holding your wife’s hand, how soft and gentle it’d been, kissing her for the last time before the… doctors put you to sleep. You remember telling her that it’d be alright, that you’d always be with her.

Something of the stomach, it had been, right? You remember the pain being numb after a while… though with the way you’re feeling now, you would never guess that. You can barely feel your own heart. You don’t wanna look. You don’t wanna look. Where the hell are you?

The glass rod nudges you again. “Rise,” a voice rings through the small room. And then there’s heat, welling up inside the glass like it’s an electric stove. It seers into the dry flesh along your chin, and you open your mouth to scream, but you can’t even manage that. Just a pathetic squeak.

And then - gods, *how!?* - you sit up. As if an invisible force grabs your hind end, it drags up against the wall, much to the complaint of your insides, which drip even more sagging flesh as you lean upwards. You feel a centipede squirm up between two of your guts. The feeling is even worse when your arms push against the splintery wood, to force you as high as you can go.

Once you’re up, your torso lulls forward across your outstretched legs. Oh, you’re in it now. You can feel your cracked ribs, how a gust of air goes into your chest and whistles out the opposite side. Is it possible to want to wretch when… you aren’t sure if you have a stomach anymore?

“Come on, my thrall. I know that you can sit up better than that.” The rod is pushing at your chin again, and forces it up no matter how much your eyes and cheeks want to melt off your bones. They’re crusted up and dry, conceding to their death.

Eventually, you sit straight up, much to the dismay of your ribs. With your lips nearly stuck together, you find something creeping out of them, sneaking up a tightened throat from distended lungs. “Where… am… I…?”

“There you go. No more time to laze around, my thrall.” That voice… you’ve heard it before. It’s foggy, and snappy, but you remember it being softer than this. You remember hearing it… sometime before you made it to the hospital. “Gaze upon me.”

One of your eyes open, and that’s about all you can manage. You see the brown, dusty swirls of the room around you, and the pricks of the nails poking out of the floorboards. In the midst of it, there’s a bright red, glowing rod of glass that still threatens to seer your chin off. It shines so bright that it almost looks superimposed on top of the rest of the room, which is so dead-looking compared to it. With your pupils low and exhausted, your iris climbs the rim of the rod, up the ancient tree branch that it must have been made of, all the way to the smooth fingers gripping it at the other side.

A *staff*. That’s the word that comes to mind. You remember once reading about wizards and witches who dominated the world before the modern age, but you thought it was all… all… Christ, is any of this real? Does it really matter if any of that insane stuff is rooted in reality when you’re sitting there, feeling your guts *melted*? Feeling ants nibbling at your insides?

“I *said* to gaze upon me, thrall.” The voice snarls, and the staff gets hotter. Either as a tear, or condensation, a drop of water streams out of your crusted eye. You recognize the voice now. Oh god, you recognize it. Out of all the voices in the world to violate your ears when you’re meant to be sound asleep in your coffin, there are few that could be worse.

“Why… why am I…”

You, who must be the “thrall,” gaze upon her, as commanded.

You remember speaking with your wife, a few months before the extended hospital stay interrupted, about how the entire atmosphere around Marigold’s printing press was starting to scare you. It started as something small: Marigold, the royally-dressed woman who ran a printing business, had pushed you when you showed up late, and crossed her arms at you. “I didn’t buy you for $500 a week just for you to steal five minutes of my time,” she had said. You only brushed past her then, apologized, and clocked in, avoiding her fingers.

And then, it was the way that her hands glided down yours while you were working. As if the sound of the clunking printer was an invitation to her. The raw tension in her fingers, the sweat they sent down your spine and the way they made your then-existent stomach turn. She mentioned your wife, and how she must be a lucky woman. A lucky, lucky woman. “Is she fulfilling all your needs?” she asked. “Ever want someone else to suck your soul out?” That soft voice, like the surface of a Marigold flower.

And then, on the hospital bed, where you were writhing and trying to keep your composure in front of your wire, as she ran her fingers through her hair in the way that made you wish to sit up and kiss her, you thought that you saw Marigold again. She’d been outside the window of your room, but it was dark out at the time, and rainy, so you convinced yourself that it was just the flash of a tree branch. Just an ordinary tree branch. Or, when you were feeling superstitious, it was a ghost ready to guide you to the afterlife. You were ready, and quite honestly, of all the things in your life to reminisce on, your job was far down on the list.

You hadn’t thought of Marigold in days. You could’ve gone all of eternity without remembering the name of the boss who once leaned in to kiss you on a Thursday afternoon, leaving the remaining 2 hours of your shift an awkward ordeal for you to shimmy through. You could’ve left her as a footnote of your life. Would you even mention the printing place to the angel tasked with weighing your life?

“In the eye, thrall,” she says now, and you want to vomit. No - why her? Why is she here, when you can’t talk back to her?

“Wh…what… have you done…?”

You look her in the eyes, the shining green eyes that had been a dull blue before. You study her face all the way down to the grin. A few more scars have made the way across her face since you last saw her.

“I was dead,” you continue. “I kissed my wife goodbye and I heard the… the heartbeat monitor stop,” you grit your teeth, though your head still lulls. Out of ink, no more miracles, your free trial of life ended - you were dead, dead, dead!

“Oh, you are dead, my thrall…” she says, leaning close to you. You expect her to stop, but she doesn’t, and soon her chapstick is violating your mouth. She sucks out your rotted breath from your plaque-covered teeth, and you lack the strength to pull away. It’s only once she does, that you once again relish in the permission to breathe, through lungs filled with bugs. “Dead as dead can be… dead, dead, dead…”

“W…was happy… being dead…”

“That’s not your choice to make, my thrall. You’re but a corpse. Do corpses get to make choices about how their owners play with them? No. And you’re a corpse. A dull, smelly corpse for me to animate as I please.”

She puts her stuff into your chest… how big is the hole? How much of you is dripping away?

“Just, a fucking, corpse. And not even one of the more useful ones under my command.”

“...why?”

“You thought that you could skip out on work by taking an unannounced vacation to the afterlife? No, no, no my thrall… think again. I invested too much training time into you to let you go to waste. I expect you to be back to work in minutes, thrall. Rise…”

You feel the joints in your legs start to light up… and you move.

No, no, no, you whisper to yourself. Not like this. You remember joking about how necromancy isn’t as scary as it sounds, how all that talk of disrupting the sanctity of the dead was hogwash. And now the wind through your chest tickles the sides of your exposed organs, teasing them, causing a beetle to flicker its wings against a drooping artery. You think of the trillions of infections creeping their way into your vessel right now.

But you stand, head lulling, eyes sagging. Something flakes off your cheek. Your hair is full of blood and loose flesh. You fail to lift your arms.

“Necromancer…” you mumble under your breath.

“That’s right, my thrall,” she bats her hair, and sticks her staff under your shoulder. “And you’re now my dull, reanimated property. It’ll be a long, long, long time before I let you return to the ground.”

[TO BE CONTINUED]