#which is a promise that by sk's immortal nature is neverending

[randomwriteronline]

One by one, the little thing had killed them.

Little doll hands wrapped around their necks, little wooden teeth sunken into their flesh. It had eaten their hearts out, choked them from the inside, replaced the oxygen in their lungs, the marrow in their bones.

One by one they had all followed along and left their lives in those sylvan palms to be torn up and fed to the forest.

How had it managed that?

How had it stolen away so many heroes?

Where much more fiersome and cruel creatures had failed time and time again, the little thing kept succeeding.

It dragged them in the depths of the inescapable woods whether alive, dead or struggling in between. It consumed them: it latched onto them and drained them, sapped the will out of their forms slowly or all at once, until they were either corpses or bewitched ghosts.

They disappeared within - their bones, their eyes, their voices. Only echoes and empty graves, their contents moved beneath hungry roots to annihilate them.

Dragged away by little hands. Stolen from their coffins.

And they were happy.

All heroes of all eras walked towards the wretched doll, smiling, arms outstretched to hug it.

They welcomed it in their hold like an old, darling friend.

They melted in its thin embrace.

How?

Why?

Some fools believed it was a protector. A messenger of the Goddess of Courage. The heroes' personal chaperone to the Heavens.

It was poison in the shape of a child.

It was the melliflous copper whisper of rot and mold, of addiction, the sweet song of self destruction, of complete loss of autonomy, and it was to their ears as sweet as the horrid stench of the biting flower is to the fly about to be mauled.

(What a strange thing.)

(To fight a whole life tooth and nail as to never fall in the clutches of death, and lunge in its arms once they overlap with those of simple, unconditional love.)

(Perhaps this too was a curse.)

(But they were children again, without worries or fears in an endless green shaded garden, and their friend adored each one of them with their whole amber heart.)

(So death seemed so loving.)

(Why run away once it comes?)

A woodland siren, indeed.