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“Hekkie,” you murmur to your plump paramour, “have you ever dreamed of devouring me?” Her skin glistens with sweat and fresh blood, scarring from your sparring, grinning gashes rippling back together. Your crown’s no longer gauntlet-gaudy, a swift slashing shadow. No, no, not anymore. Perching outside your scarlet tent, dwelling in a smaller shelter, drowsing.
She smiles- smirks, rather, fangs sharp as a star’s spear, thick tongue peeking beyond her lips. Grants you a nod. Sometimes you suspect she prefers this silence, throat pulsing with breath, not blood. Leaving you to interpret her laconicisms, her savage whims.
Sweat slicks your wool like the lanolin-salves your sawbones toil over. Your heart doesn’t beat, but jolt, ribcage curling in closer, clasping yourself tighter. In Darkwood’s domain, your folk were prey, plentiful pilgrims to be picked off, even before She and Her-fellow-gods cleft you from your life, even before you saw Your kin slaughtered.
(What did your former master do with the souls? Where do you think the devotion came from, child?)
And after- after You were revived, animate but not alive, flesh crawling over your skeleton once more, veins swollen with dark dark ichor, hooves cleaving into claws, horns gilded scythes, you didn’t have fangs.
Not until you slew Narinder. Until you were drunk on devotion, it and fervor thrumming through your sinews and strata, so full it strained you at the seams. Sinthe price of god-slaying(?), sickly-sweet, curdling on your parched tongue. Your skin peeled back from your skull, you remember, or you dream you do. Hunger honed, skull sliced off into sharp angles and jaw splintering under the weight of something, blood sizzling in your saliva, when your throat started to BURN—
Sometimes you wish You did not remember.
(The stray prey-animal you lost once you’d left life? Caught by a coronavirus, shackled into strife..)
Then Heket’s tongue schlurrrrps scrapes licks against your wool, spit thick as only a toad’s can be and purgatory’s paces why is she doing this?
“Distraction.” Your Crown slumbers, but your mind’s not the fortress you fought for, not in this age. Her mental voice is as rich and resonant as copper, scalding, blazing like a young sun, like the flames of Your fury, nearly taunting.
“Wanted to drag you out of overthinking,” she adds. Her smile sags, then splits her snout once more. “Besides. You are tasty.”
What a non-creepy compliment! “Thanks, I suppose?”
“Why did you ask if you don’t wish to be devoured?”
You remember dueling her, first in her hall, then in Her hell, Purgatory’s rancid palace. Her countenance cracking apart, baring a blade-bristling maw, one long, rotting tongue, slurping ’til you were slipping; her, belching flies. Flies and bombs.
You remember the heat of battle, the pyre-bloom of power, fervor caressing your skin as you cut down cultists, just carcasses for your gauntlets to gorge upon. You remember Her snarl, her declaration, divine proclamation. MAKE YOUR PEACE, CREATURE. YOU WILL NOT LEAVE THIS TEMPLE.
(Not without a few more woes, at any rate).
You remember myriad tongues soaring from her maw, a slithering swarm of worn-leather-tough and dripping meat. The menticide-mushroom-bitter stench of her saliva spattering your wool. Curdling your curls into lacking, shriveling, locks. The roar she uttered before unleashing more hive-harbingers of horror.
You remember the wet rip of flesh fleeing from flesh as her sins darted after yours, the daunting dowager-dome of her head parting: exploding: fervor and coins, yours for the taking. Glimmering like so many golden tears.
You gift her a glance now, and she’s still grinning, tongue trailing across her teeth like a flaccid ribbon. “Yes?”
Abandoning your role as your region’s ruler would be unwise, but the concept seemed interesting. “Would I not perish, though?”
“Your Crown will remember enough of you.”
(Chemach’s coronet clawing into her cerebrum, rooting, searching..)
“And you are the God of Death now, Khnum.” Didn’t another, older god bear this title? Did she swallow it when he perished, when the only faith there was, was in Her? Clay-creature.. Sweat-dewed fingers worm their way around your hooves, tugging, nipping gently. Wart-warded and age-mottled and abundant with flesh.
You remember her arrival at the Cult, hunger-hollowed, forcing you to feed as well. Before Covid-as-a-child came, before Kallamar was cut loose from Purgatory’s bowels, before.
You kiss her hand, licking her fingers in return— then-
{ [ (You remember her title as the goddess of Famine) ] } !
No salts or spices prick your skin; no, you’re simply there in Heket’s gut, bare as any other slab of meat. Tumbling down the trembling, gulping tunnel of her throat, flesh grazed by her fangs. Shorn of sorcery, reduced to a shivering runt. Hooves already slick with the swelling slosh of her stomach’s toxins, licking-lapping-burning. You might’ve been the kindling, but She is the noontide flame. Blasphemers caught and crushed by her teeth, wrath sparked by sorrow, as fire feeds on air, as death needs souls.
Her alimentary acids sting as they spill over you, but it’s a nip compared to the aches you’ve endured. A tickle, a ripple, a smothering stream. (She’s the goddess of fallow fields and folks, she’s covered up child-corpses before.. Symbol of slain innocence, is this ironic?)
“Revenge?” Her voice crackles through you, timbre tomb-deep in the barrow of her belly. The Crown- where’d it go- still reading me? And She laughs like the fall of mountains, throat-scars puckering like a sneer. “You decide, ẖnmw?” A throaty purr, or perhaps another epithet. “It’s your deicide.”
“I gave you your voice back. Shouldn’t that count for something?”
(Stale air spilling out of your splitting-sagging neck, a gasp exhumed, sorrow-sweet blood trickling down your tongue. Sharp as the executioner’s smile, darkness cradling you as you staggered back, clutching-clawing-not-quite-closing. Gone).
Habit-hewn heartbeats of silence. Irrelevant as your thirst for oxygen, now.
“Not worth it to command corses,” she grumbles at last. One hand plunges down to knead her belly. Soothing stimulus-seeking? Mayhaps, mayhaps, mayhaps. Not a mother’s embrace. Not for you, dip[shit]-terra. Not for you not for covid not for
“ ’Nnyway. Only reason I swallowed you was because your Crown keeps you fresh. Enough.” Yes. Snug in her sagging shelter, bathed and kissed by acid, all the old layers of your skin, your stone-flaking shell, seem to have peeled away. Like stripping flesh from a fruit, sweet fly. Easy as slaughtering a shearling, dear rotting-darling.
Her season, summer, has been dead for a while now. If seasons did pass, really. You’ve been having the oddest hoary dreams about a wyrm.. Yhhng… Yngya? (Oh, so Covid can keep all my kid-memories, but my body gets to remember being murdered—and this? Fucking flesh-prison).
“You are tasty, though.” It’s a dubious honor, but sure, okay, you’ll take it. And stuff it down the gullet of one of your oldest graves. No one shall steal your veal anymore. No one will dare to, not with Heket around. You shrug, tilt your starveling-sleek head, surrender a sigh as her stomach walls pulse around you. What were you going on about two moments ago.. Covid? It had suggested a holiday for you and the rest of the Cult, dated approximately to your birthday. Lambsmas. Gods- err, me, what a dull name.
“You’re not as bitter as I expected.” Her hands caress her belly, and you can feel it, somehow. Like stroking the shell of a dying pumpkin. Still cradling the flame within. “There’s a few sour notes—grassy bile, oversalted ichor”—in your defense, that was a remedy for Long Covid!—“but your heart’s half-metaphorically sweet.”
“Yeah?” (Curdling, churning, the acids slurping closer..) “And- Heket? Would you mind chomping down a few menticide mushrooms so I won’t perish in agony?”
“I could always regurgitate you, knock you out, and properly eat you.”
“Fetishistic,” you mumble. An idol demanding worship, a conduit for strange desires. Are you the sex object in this tale? “Mmmh.. okay. As long as I’m not totally brain-dead.”
(Because you’re dead, and you have brain damage! Bahahahaa, gettit?)
(Long-covid-induced damage, but whatever).
“Maybe,” she smirks. “Just for you, Khnemu.”