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In the sepulcher: greed.
Meticulously carved from limestone, an empty sepulcher demands a corpse. It beckons, it screams, it hungers. It must. It must. It must.
There is no sky, there is no sea, there is no wind, there is no water. The husks hold no appreciation for the artful carving and embellishment drawn upon their tombs, and yet, it hungers for the wine-rich throb of blood. It hungers for the sensation of steel teeth masticating unwilling flesh from bone.
Blood for blood, flesh for flesh. A language far older than any spoken tongue. A language born from wrath, from pride, from avarice, from desire.
Tonight, it calls for a feast. Without abandon, without abstinence, it calls for another to take, to consume, to devour. No moral can strike its baseless fear because, here, no mortal dare reach. And it tonight, it feasts,
feasts,
feasts.
Being a human sacrifice is far from ideal.
Rope digs into her flesh and pulls her arms as if to tear them apart. The stone floor forces skin against bone, pieces of gravel carving themselves. The candlelight threatens to burn her dark hair as the black wax drips and drips.
Whether she screamed or she whispered, no answer would return to her. The faceless figures shrouded in shadow and kneeled in ceremony revealed little for her. They only chanted in an ancient language not even she knew herself.
One by one, the candlelight vanishes. One by one, the wick grows cold.
One figure crawled to her with a dagger in hand, sitting back only to raise the steel blade aimed for her heart.
The limestone tomb awaits her, she figures. Empty like a maw awaiting the victual it so desperately craves.
And so, she closes her eyes and saves her breath.
As the candlelight flickers to a close, a scream cuts through.
Ragged breaths hunger for air, gasping, coughing.
The wet sound of blood draining was not hers, but the ground does not hide movement as well as the dark. Nail scrapes, drops of blood, swish of fabric—
The crack of bone. The squelch of flesh.
Obsidian spills forth, and a figure falls to the ground next to her, breathless and limp, and cold to the touch. An unfortunate mirror of her.
The ground shook in a careful beat, slow as a sleeping heart. Against the limestone, it confesses itself a beast. In the dark, there were few as trustworthy as the floor she strains against.
A single breath warms her skin like a reminder, and the lightest brush of air tries to fool her with the idea of a hand just ghosting over her. The rope loosens as though a blade had cut through it effortlessly, merely falling off with no effort of her own. Her arms are freed first, then her legs and ankles. A relief long awaited as the cuts and burns fade away as something ghosts over her skin.
She stands free at last.
Though, the aftermath is no less than gruesome.
Candles light themselves on the ground, brighter, cooler, just out of reach of the corpses who lit them. Pulled from them are their disgorged entrails. Broken and shattered bone with marrow dripping from their splinters. Blackened blood pooled into the patterns of a cursed sigil with a shade contesting the abyssal seabed.
But above them, the summoned beast stares with starved ruby eyes. Its claws mark the stone like mere footsteps. Its head uncomfortably close to the ceiling. A creature not of this world, yet one whose horror was comfort beyond comprehension.
“Ash.” She greets plainly.
The beast bows its head to her, reverent and adoring. So slowly, it moves, as if frightened of itself, as if the air was prone to shatter.
As the macabre backdrop of corpses fade into dust, the flickering candlelight brightens without the searing heat it once threatened. Even multiplying for the mere sake of sight, yet never so that was piercing. In irony, it mirrors the warmth of romance, of a night accompanied by a fine dinner as lovers silently urge for something more.
It sings a low bellow to her in language unknown to her, yet she understands it all the same. An apology, she surmises. One well heard. The bloodshed is merely performative, it confesses quietly. Its wrath was consuming. Mercy had no place here, except for her, who deserved far more.
In return, she places a gentle hand on its head.
She sits on the floor, inviting the beast before her to rest. A chaste kiss is pressed to its forehead, whose bellows seem more hums. The rise and fall of its breath slows, and so does the pulse of its heart.
“Thank you, but I didn’t need to be saved— Why do you look so sad?”