#YC; Echidnaya

[vagevuur-writing]

The Strange and the Undead

Another thing I wrote for the InkChat. It was an impulse write though. Made it up as I went.

The backstory of my Inkdrian Styx.

There’s a mention of Death and also we focus on a corpse for like 2 seconds. It’s not graphic but it’s there.

The small whaling vessel hesitantly made it's way through the murky waters, most of its crew in a constant state of fright and awareness. They usually didn't enter these waters. People disappeared here.

This time was different though, one of the fishermen remarked to himself, as he glanced at the prow of the boat. A mysterious figure clad in a cloak that hid everything stared out solemnly to the ocean ahead. They had paid handsomely for the fishermen to transport them here.

They didn't like their mother. Even as a child, they had known she was up to no good, and they did not want to partake in whatever foul thing it was she needed them for.

At day, the pair stayed in a cave, where mother would teach them small things, like how to control the substance their bodies were made of. At night, they traveled. They did not know where their mother was taking them, and they didn't want to find out.

One night, when their mother was scouting the area to see if there was anyone around, they ran. They ran so far. Behind them they heard their mother shouting for them, but already their legs were far longer than hers, and eventually they lost her. It was like taking a breath of fresh air. They were free.

They quickly came upon a small village, and although at first the people found them scary, with their white hair and silver skin and exposed bones, they eventually warmed up to them. They found a home.

"Did ya see their face?" One fisherman asked another, who shook his head.

"Not even an inch of exposed skin anywhere." He scratched his neck nervously, then turned around quickly as if he had felt someone staring. Seeing no one, he hesitantly turned back to his mate. "Do you have any idea why they might want to go there?"

Now it was to the first fisherman to shake his head, "Not a clue. But I'm tellin' ya, if we don't find anything in the next half hour, I'm going to vouch to the capt'n to turn this ship around." He shivered, "This place gives me the heebie-jeebies."

Within a year, everyone was dead. Everyone except them.

It had started small. A rice field had flooded here, a herd of sheep had been slaughtered by wolves there. Fish began to leave the waters, causing fisherman to have to go out further to catch just a little bit.

It didn't stay small for very long. A child was hospitalized, bearing the symptoms of a strange and unknown sickness. And then another. And then an elder. More and more people began showing signs of this sickness. People began dying.

The first big harvest of the season failed, and then the second. People grew hungry. More people became sick. The small infirmary couldn't hold all of them anymore, and they had to house them in the small temple up the hill instead. The priest spoke a blessing, and then another, in the hope their god would not be angered by this sacrilege.

The temple and the surrounding woods burned down, along with all the patients housed there, and the only doctor for miles.

By this time people had already turned their accusations to the newcomer, and they were outcast once more. But they didn't leave. They couldn't. These were their friends! Their family!

A shout was heard from starboard, and one of the men was frantically pointing at the waters. Beneath the waves, down below in the depths, shone millions of bright lights, and, if you inspected closer, a vague shadow.

The stranger had noticed it too, and was now staring down into the waters instead of ahead. Their face was hidden, but they didn't seem scared in the slightest.

Even when everyone was dead, from either the fire, the famine or the plague, they didn't leave. For days they sat in the town square, unmoving. A few feet from them lay a girl who had collapsed there of hunger and never stood up again.

They had like her alot. They had even hoped that, when they were both older, they might start a family together. But now it would never happen. They could hardly even look at her sickly green and rotting face.

"Well well", a sudden, familiar voice spoke from behind them. "And here I thought you couldn't do that."

They shot up. Behind them stood their mother, who seemed awfully satisfied for someone who just came upon a ghost town where it's former inhabitants still littered the streets.

"Maybe that means I must be immune to it" She appeared to be talking more to herself than to them "I mean, I have seen your father too, and still I feel like Hermes himself blessed me with the health of a god."

"What are you doing here!?" They were almost shaking from a sudden, seething anger, "Did you do this!?"

She finally looked at them "What? Me? Dear no! I could only wish." She placed a hand on their shoulder, a motherly gesture that disgusted them beyond reason. They could see her craning her neck to look up at her child, who was so much taller than she was. "No dear. You did this", she said with a smile and a sparkle in her eyes, as if that was the greatest news in the world.

The world started spinning around them as her words sank in. They rolled up a small as they possibly could, right next to the girl they loved.

The girl they killed.

The vague shadow became a clear, dark, presence that now swam in front of their ship. Strange and colorful glowing birds shout out from the water around it and swarmed the crew, causing the boat to come to a slow but shocking halt in front of the shadow that kept becoming bigger and darker, and the water became wilder as something emerged from the deep.

The first thing that broke the water's surface was a skull, at least twice the size of the tiny boat, with a sickly green gas coming from the breathing hole on top of it. As it rose towards great heights, a ribcage of similar proportions followed, attached to it two arms, with which it leaned on the seafloor. The strange birds flew around the creature's head and nested in its ribcage, and around it in the waters swum fish of similar colorful eeriness.

Its sockets contained no eyes, but yet it seemed to be staring straight through every man on the ship, reading their every desire and fear. The crew wasted no time trying to get away from the monster, but on a tiny boat in a deep ocean, there weren't many places to hide.

And although it had no proper mouth, still it brought over a clear message, like a feeling, a vibration in the air.

"Who dares wake me from my slumber?"

The mysterious figure at the prow moved up a hand and grasped the edge of their hood, and, after a little hesitation, flipped it off, revealing silver skin and hair colored three shades of sickly green that hovered around their head as if they were underwater. They opened their mouth, and, with a voice that seemed too old and raspy for someone of their apparent age they said;

"I dare. Father."