[Dimmie Dunce]

DISCLAIMER: I do not RP this character, and was asked to make this post for them.

Tonight the moon hangs low.

She sits with her back against this old cedar, claws idle in the dirt, resting after a long hunt.

...and she remembers being small.

Truly small.

A shivering scrap of fur and instinct, belly gnawing itself hollow, every sound a threat, every beast and magi a death sentence. Thought was a luxury she didn’t own. There was only the next breath, the next scrap of meat, the next heartbeat that hadn’t yet stopped. She watched packmates, wolves like her, once, lose the last thin thread of themselves. Eyes glazing over with unbridled hunger, bodies twisting as they rose...

Saekanis embraced them.

And then came her own night.

The change wasn't gentle. It arrived like a claw through the sternum. Hunger sharpened, anger folded over and over until it was rage, rage folded again until it was fury. What she thought was hunger before, was incomparable to the sensation of starvation, sending sharp pains through her gut.

That first full moon she stood trembling on new legs, and she waited for the sweet release of mindlessness. For Saekanis to pour in and fill the hollows. To become, just like her brothers and sisters.

It never came.

Instead she felt…elsewhere.

A pulse.

Not in her chest.

But, in her core.

Under the soil, under the stone, through every blade of grass and tree around her..

Something alive, something wounded, something ancient and patient and angry in a way that makes her own fury feel like a child’s tantrum.

Gaia.

 

She didn’t hear a voice. There were no pretty words, no golden purpose handed down from the gods. Just that knowing. A tug in the marrow. A certainty that the hunger in her isn’t an end, it’s a tool. The claws, the teeth, the roots and brambles, they aren’t meant to devour everything until nothing remains.

They’re meant to cut away what strangles Her.

She is not a child of pure ruin.

She is not another mouth for the Wyrm to feed.

She is the blade Gaia grew when the poison had gone too deep.

And twins, how that truth burns.
 

Because if she is Her blade, then every day she fails to strike is another day the rot spreads. Every moment she hesitates, every corrupted thing she lets walk away, is another wound on a body that has already bled too much. The yearning never quiets. It coils behind her ribs like a second heartbeat.

Destroy. Cleanse. Devour.

Sometimes she wonders if the difference between her and the ones who fall is only this: they surrendered to the hunger because it was easier.

She carries it like a vow instead.

Tonight the moon watches her, and she watches the dark beyond the trees. Somewhere out there the plagues gather. Those of the void, that seek to destroy her Gaia. The rotting ones, who spread plague and harm the forests in ways she knows are unnatural. Here she rests, too wounded, to weary to hunt, yet she believes...

She believes...

She was born from prey.

She became predator.
She was warped by Saekanis.
She was embraced by Gaia.

And now…now she thinks she was born to become something else entirely.

Gaia’s answer to the question no one asked: What happens when the world is too sick to heal itself?

She happens.

And she is so very, very tired of watching her mother suffer.

DISCLAIMER: I do not RP this character, and was asked to make this post for them.