#fun fact the birth panel is painted in my own blood

[fruitbratz]

heres my final for my drawing:visualization class :3

mixed media of ink, colored penicl, watercolor, and digital painting

based off of my oc nadia, who i will introduce on this account shortly

[gimmetheheadcanons]

A Witch’s Lullaby - Day 2 Gothic Klonnie

A/N: So this is my second Klonnie short for #Gothic Klonnie 2k18 (much shorter and kinda extra...actually embarrassingly lol). It is connected to Day One. How you ask...all will be revealed on Day 3!

again usual disclaimers this filled with more errors than usual cos 1) wrote it on my phone and 2) I’m posting with no edits to make it on the deadline. not my best work but hey we���re here for fun!

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Day 2: Cwtsh : a safe place; the space of the cupboard under the stairs.

In the past, this place and its constant creaking kept him alert. Ears open mouth shut, listening out for the heavy footsteps of his master’s servants. Each travelling with great speed and great fear up and down those steps. Each time, a handful of dark confetti rained down onto his head and a cloud of dust, dirt and distrust danced before his eyes. 

Each roll of thunder, a pair of feet belonging to an enemy capable of revealing his position. Each pair -  but one - perfectly willing to watch him receive a further helping of righteous pain at the hands of their shared tormentor. An audience for a tyrant as he would gleefully dispense a particularly vicious brand of paternal love. An audience, relieved to be spared much of the same. Watching on as a bloodied child was once more thrown out of the main house where his brothers and sisters blissfully slept. Once more made to crawl his way up to the stables and bear the weight of their sins. 

“With the beasts you shall stay boy. Your true kin.”

Out there, exposed to the elements, the education would continue.

Die or deny them.

The bullets of rain insisted.

Die or deny them.

The bullwhip wind declared.

And whenever he thought to do the first, she would make other plans.

Offer him a kinder alternative. Respite to spite their master. 

Carry him. Shelter him. Feed him.

Have him huddled up in this space under the staircase; a stowaway in his own home. Tenderly lay his shivering body out, onto the only bed it could ever remember having -  an emptied out corn sack stuffed with whatever could be spared in the way of household linen.

A mother, should a godless, fatherless abomination dare to dream of ever having such a heavenly thing.

A mother. The child-sized, darker hands caressing his fevered head felt just the same.

There, safely pressed against her warm chest and tickled by her curls as she drew him even closer, he could finally float away.

A boy unbothered by thoughts of the torment yet to come. The threatening tapping from up above turned into a harmless tune, a quiet rhythm to serve her loving lullaby.  

Her song spun a web of magic. A protective layer shrouding him from danger.

“My poor witch”

“They'll hang you if they find you.”

He said what he said and still she sang in a tongue long outlawed. Sang her songs from shores lost to her and hers. Sang for him until the shutters came down on the realm of death and he knew his answer could never again be ‘die’.

Death had been denied.

Yet all that death she took away over the years had to go somewhere.

His worried words now an ill-fated prophecy, one her wisdom and magic must have coaxed out of him.

She knew of her fate just as he did and yet when it came to finally pass, it was he who wept without grace. 

“They’ll hang me too! They have to!”

“No! The others won’t allow it. They can’t!”

The others.

The six who got daylight; whilst he nothing but the sickly pale glow of the moon. A face in the shadows, hungry for more than scraps. Six, unable to help as the borrowed brightness that had come their miserable brother’s way was set to be extinguished. 

His cries, that of an inconsolable babe. Freshly orphaned in this world. Much younger in that terrible moment, he fell to his knees and begged. Recalling to eyes that would not meet his, how hers had been first green he ever saw. 

Green, a colour he sought out and loved. 

Until that day his master took her and he failed to fight him. Made to stand witness, in the harsh and unfamiliar sun, as the green garden only his siblings ever truly enjoyed turned into an open grave.  

Her song ended by the swing of a rope.

Under the cover of a white oak tree she continued to gentle sway. Her hair catching rays and leaves for a while. 

He ran. To escape the image that followed, he ran. 

The green of her eyes engulfed by so much frightful red.

Now...sometimes, a ghost of a whistle played on his lips. The exact notes and melody, a secret lost to him as he shed that shameful skin and crawled out of that safe place.

Her songs had subdued him for long enough.

His homecoming was set to a magnificent chorus of bloody screams. A reprise much more suited to the man he had become. The man taking an axe to that cursed tree and then to those responsible for violating its beauty first. 

When the cries ended. He heard the spirit of a scared boy speak his final piece.  

“They’ll hang you...”

A reply was prepared without him needing to drop his trusted instrument but he paused long enough anyway; to wipe that rare, priceless red paint from his face so he could admire its final masterful stroke with clearer colder eyes.  

“They will need to find another tree.”

His declaration was complete. With great difficulty, he pulled his weapon free from the jagged mesh of flesh and bone longing to hold onto it. The rich crimson smear left behind on the white oak panels that once kept out so much of his pain left him breathless. 

His former home appeared so much smaller than he remembered, the space now bulging with the excess of its latest occupants. He struggled for sometime to make the new arrangement work for his guests. He worried not however, knowing he could count on their patience - their silence - as they had on his.

Unflinching, soaked in sweat and so much blood, he finally shut the tiny wooden door on his past; on his cruel former master and on the weak woman who birthed him then betrayed him. 

Both would remain there now, more cut up than he ever was. Denied the decency of a Christian burial by the heathen they once harboured out of Christian duty. 

He smiled as he listened to the familiar scurrying of servants, travelling with great fear and great speed. 

Fleeing the hell they just witnessed. The hell unleashed by a mere man.

Godless. Fearless. Set free by strange sinful songs she was banned from singing.

Soon, soldiers would come, carrying their sabres, their silly muskets, and he would meet them with laughter.

How were they to know the thing they were sent to fight could not be killed? 

They were his secrets. 

His and hers alone. 

The whispers of love in the walls of that small space, where she shut the door on the possibility of death long ago. 

And Death, impatient and angry, would be left to knock for an eternity.

Knock and knock and knock....

Humiliated and denied entry by the new and only master of this grand home. 

All he had left to do now was once more shed; shed the constraints of this skin which served its base purpose. Shed and then walk these halls more freely.  

Stay upstairs now. Forever. 

And what would he do with forever? Such freedom?

Guard their secrets. Guard over the last thing that moved him as a human being - the memory of dark curls, gentle hands and the strange spells she sang. 

Spells, time would reveal were in fact nothing more than long forgotten lullabies. The magic that he was so convinced made him immortal, ageless wisdom and truth translated to be sorrow-filled pleas. A melody, set to the words of a mother begging her child to let go of all the things that would weigh him down.

Let go and float away...

Let go to be with me...