Fff263 - Blog Posts

Clarity

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FFF263 In the Meadows prompt

1317 word count (I'm sorry it's a bit over... I tried condensing as much as I could.)

CW: violence, referenced forced drug use, a bit of body horror, and dehydration.

Summary: Maren wakes up in an unfamiliar meadow with a clear mind after years of living under a fog.

On an island surrounded by great forests sat a meadow hiding from the ocean. Laying among the blades of grass that swept by her like waves on the ocean, Maren woke in a state of listlessness. She was utterly exhausted, and without the aid of the deep to facilitate her navigation, she was stuck against the cool earth, blind to all but a gentle warmth on her skin.

Usually, she was quite sluggish between hunts, struggling with even the most basic of thoughts, waiting until they charged the water with those fowl drugs, sending her into a frenzy. Occasionally, she would have bouts of clarity, usually just long enough to witness the end of her hunt, but now it felt like her mind was sharper than it had been in years. With this new freedom, Maren’s thoughts drifted to the fathomless depths of what had until recently been her home.

With a clear mind, Maren did not remember it with the fondness she had felt when her brother was given the opportunity to show his devotion to the queens, or in the reverence that had surged through Maren’s entire being when her sister was accepted as a royal guard.

‘Oh how fortunate you are, Maren, to have been bestowed with the favor of our queens.’

How many lonely nights in the empty nursery had she prayed for such a thing before her naive devotion had doomed her? No, she had long lost any reverence for their tyranny, and her thoughts of that place had turned just as rotten as her limbs in the burning darkness of the mines.

Musing about her isolation, Maren could see herself for the pawn she had been. Her mother had warned her long ago, but the queen’s guard had claimed her mother was a traitor, not to be trusted. She had been ripped away from Maren before those precious lessons could be ingrained properly, and so, like a fool Maren had fallen for every lie they’d fed her, burying the barbed hook of their deception deeper into her throat until she wasn’t even a shell of what she had once been.

Another gust of wind swept by, drying her skin. Despite her newfound clarity, all of these revelations were little comfort in the face of her demise. Maren would have laughed at the irony if the queens had left her a proper mouth. At least death didn’t seem so painful as the screams of her victims had made it sound. The executioner, the being that even the queens had grown to fear as a monster, was going to die, dried up on land like some hapless fish that had unwittingly beached itself.

If there had been a higher power, and her wordless prayers had been heard in the darkness of her isolation, then maybe she had been spared from living in that hell any longer. After so many years of being a puppet, Maren wouldn’t be picky about the means of her salvation, and this was already too grand a fate for a monster such as herself. After all the innocent lives she had taken in the name of the queens, she deserved a far greater punishment. She accepted this death and was glad she could greet it in her own right mind.

As time continued to pass, Maren could feel her muscles gradually beginning to shrivel down as her breathing became ragged and the warmth against her skin continued to sap the life from her veins. Maren’s mind was fluttering away, split between fragmented memories of faces she could barely recall, until she felt something warm suddenly pressed under her scorched skin, lifting her up from her grassy resting place. The sudden shift cracked her skin at odd angles, causing sharp spikes of pain to run across her body, but she made no effort to move. Even with the sudden sensation of a beating heart coursing underneath her, the dehydration was too far along for Maren to comprehend anything until she suddenly lost track of the pulse and felt water enveloping her.

WIthin seconds of being submerged, her cracked skin healed over, and she began to explore the area, exhibiting a level of curiosity she thought had been lost to youth. A strange sense of wonder overtaking her foggy reason. Once satisfied with her findings, Maren turned her attention to the surface, she could sense another presence, and her newfound curiosity drove her to inspect.

“** ****, ****** *****.”

It was a strange chirpy language, nothing like the deep bellows she was familiar with from the Briney Court, but not entirely unpleasant. Even if she couldn’t understand the words, at this range, Maren was fairly confident when it came to gauging intent, and the voice sounded relieved. The emotion confused her, and after a brief hesitation, Maren found herself getting closer to the edge in an attempt to form a connection with one of her functional arms.

As Maren’s arm came in contact with an outstretched hand, she felt her limb quickly entangle the arm above to establish a connection. A flood of information cascaded freely into her mind as Maren saw the world through this creature’s eyes and understood his feelings, at least on the surface.

It wasn’t a skill she relied on, and had only resorted to it as a form of interrogation or out of pure desperation from isolation in her moments of clarity, and on every occasion she was met with a flood of negative emotions that were strangely absent here. Interested to find out more, Maren decided that it would be good to spark discussion with the creature so she could properly take in the terrain from the stranger’s eyes and enjoy the strange company she found herself in.

“Why am I here?”

She could tell he was quite shocked by her sudden intrusion into his mind, and flinched, waiting for him to pull away, but unlike the fear or anger that she had so often experienced with her own kind, the individual seemed more amused than anything.

“The tank you were being transported in broke open in the crash, I think? I was worried that I ate everyone, but if they were transporting you like that, then they probably deserved to die anyway...”

There was more that he wanted to say about that, but he stopped. There was no reason to pry about his eating habits, but at the mention of a tank, Maren quickly skimmed through his latest memories, carefully extracting what she was looking for. It was more of a glass coffin filled with stagnant water and salt crystals as far as she could tell. Frustrated by the torturous design, Maren pulled away, severing their connection while trying to remember how she could have ended up in such a thing?

“* ***** *** *** **** **** ********.”

The unintelligible words once more filled her mind, pulling it away from the putrid memory. Wondering if he had any more information about the situation, Maren quickly re-established the connection and caught his assumption that she had been kidnaped. A laughable conclusion, but he didn’t know any better. No one made it in and out of her cave alive, not while she was on the hunt, it was more likely the queens had drugged her last victim with something stronger than usual and tried to dispose of her for good. Though why they would go through all the trouble of shipping her in a glass coffin was a complete mystery. Whatever their intentions, there had been an intervention of some sort, and those involved had been properly taken care of.

“Thank you for saving me.”

A warm sensation spread through the connection as he exhibited genuine happiness at her remark. The surge shocked her slightly, but she found that it was an easy sensation to get used to. She had been given the salvation she longed for, and this creature had been the instrument to accomplish it.

Note: This is Maren after years of experimentation, all in the attempt to make an eldrich creature artificially. I use the term arms in place of tentacles because tentacles sounded a bit weird when I was writing it, and 'arms' has been used as an acceptable term, so I just went with it instead. Sorry for any confusion.