Work Text:
Eyes
They were everywhere.
They could feel their eyes looming upon them, watching from the darkness. The cold, deadly darkness they all learned to fear. A darkness that was something more. A darkness that smothered every fire he tried to light up, singing a song that sounded an awful lot like the lullabies their mothers used to sing to them when they were children to calm them down after a nightmare. But their mothers are no more. Most of them are not children anymore, or they still are only in their appearance. Nightmares are real. The darkness has eyes and it is hungry.
And they can't do nothing but sit still, watching.
Bones
Wilson thought that was a good idea until he realized it was not.
He saw creatures coming back to life on the Lunar Island. Zombie Pengulls rising from the ocean, a bunch of bones and rotting organs encased into ice, and just slaughtered hounds shredding their own bloodied skins to rise up again as vicious and hungry as before. He saw the skeleton in the grassland, a corpse that was not one of their own. One of those from before the New Reign. Wilson thought that maybe they would be happy to be brought back, so he took off and applied the science to bring back the dead to the laws of the Island and it worked. Except not as he was expecting to.
The Skeleton was crawling on the ground, headed towards him. They emitted no sound, a natural consequence of being void of lungs and windpipe. There was nothing besides white bones and maybe a ghost animating them, but the Skeleton somehow knew his position.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry," he muttered under his breath. "I thought your body would heal like the other times. Please, I didn't mean to..."
He felt the ocean behind him. The boat was far and he came alone. The Skeleton stopped when he was a few feet away from him. They started to move their right arm, scratching the sand. They were trying to write something. Wilson approached, in part relieved by that sign of human sentience. His blood froze when he read the only request that unknown person was asking of him.
Kill me.
Guts and gore
Wendy was missing the old method.
Sure it was nice that now she just needed to whisper for Abigail to be with her again, but there was something magical about the previous method. She could still catch and slaughter rabbits and butterflies because they still needed their meat and their wings to satisfy their hunger, but that little ritual was not needed anymore. But she kept doing it from time to time, just for the old times' sake.
"You know what to do, Abigail," the girl whispered to the flower. She grabbed a flint and she cut open the rabbit in her grasp, spurting blood and guts all around her.
And Abigail emerged from the flower, dancing.
Teeth
Something bit him.
Wilson could not understand what was going on. The day lasted only a couple of hours, and he had barely enough grass and wood to build a campfire. He settled for a torch. It did not last long, leaving him in total darkness. Wilson was used to the darkness, in a way he found it to be soothing. He liked watching the stars in the sky when he was a kid, and total darkness was the perfect environment to fully appreciate the greatness that reminded him of how much there was still to discover in the universe.
But that place was wrong and just like the passage of time, even the night was weird. There were no stars in the sky, and he could not see the moon. He already saw a couple of spiders as big as his own head walking through the trees of the forest when the sun was setting, and that sight convinced him that camping there would have been the worst idea possible. And, as soon as the torch ran out, he felt the rush of something behind his back, followed by the searing pain of teeth stabbing through his left shoulder.
Wilson ignored the pulsing wound and the blood smearing his clothes. He scavenged more grass and twigs in a desperate attempt to build a new torch, but it was already too late. The adrenaline rushing into his veins and out of his body was somehow not sufficient to cover the hushing sound of the deadly creature who was approaching from the darkness.
He felt the teeth into his throat, then nothing more until he heard that voice again.
"Say pal, you don't look so good..."
Hallowed Nights
Hallowed Nights was Wurt's favorite holiday.
Maybe it was because she met the scaleless for the first time during that occasion. Back then there were just Wicker-lady, sad girl, Abby-gill, and Webby boy. They were looking at pictures together in the swamp and then the swamp happened. To them it was scary, to mermkind it was normal. The spiderfolks assaults, the tentacles trying to whip on them (maybe the scaleless liked it even if they complained, the tentacles were easy to avoid!), and the mermkind defending their homes were just a day like any other in the swamp, but the scaleless were still scared. Eventually a tentacle caused them to fly away.
They left their book of pretty pictures and their bag of tasty bits behind. Wurt took them and she enjoyed them. Once that she memorized the pictures and the tasty bits were gone, she asked the adult mermfolks where she could find the scaleless so that they could give her more. It took her a while to find them, and the scaleless took some more time not to be scared by her before Wicker-lady could understand that she was trying to talk to them. Wicker-lady was kind and she gave her more tasty little animal to eat, sweet bits of stuff, strange round or flat foods on sticks, and more books with pretty figures. Sometimes there were just more words for her to learn and it made her head hurt, but they were mostly nice books.
She was still learning their language (why do scaleless need so many sounds and difficult words to communicate?), sometimes the scaleless' habits were too weird for her to fully accept them (how could they eat dead bodies?! That's disgusting!), but Wurt was happy with them. Webby boy, sad girl, Abby-gill and pine boy were children just like her, and they were happy to play with her, even if they still tripped in the tentacles from time to time when they played in the swamp under the benevolent watch of the one true king and his guards.
She thought about it when they sat down wearing nice dresses in the middle of the swamp, reading and watching pictures from one of Wicker-lady's books, mermfolks not disturbing and spiderfolks kept far by Webby boy's own folks. It was a nice break from the swamp life and Wurt was enjoying it.
She liked wearing dresses and eating candies. She liked having books with nice pictures. And most importantly, she liked that she had other children and a nice Wicker-lady to enjoy these things with.