Wednesday Ponderings

Wound up doing some soul searching today. Mainly thinking about what I really want to focus on as a longer project.  I enjoy doing singular prompts and saying I’m doing something but I really (despite my actions otherwise) want to work on a larger project and stick with it (Or at least that’s what I tell myself). For the most part I’ve figured I wanted to write a slice of life story and as my soul searching turned to review I keyed in on my own morbid thoughts. I did want a slice of life story, but something with a bit more kick. Something with a character that could love you one moment and kill everyone you love in the next moment. I realized Demon and Priest was something that felt sharp as I wrote it and felt clear when I read it.  So after some more, ya I like that, I wrote a prompt that reflected the kinda of evil/ not evil character dynamics I like to see.

 

A creature that walks the line between

Monster and human cute or interesting but can kill you just like that.

 

 

 

The creature reclines into the rust and mulch of the alley, slivers of crumbling steel sinking into its back. Wrinkles and stretches of time pull out as it laughs at its own fate. Its milky white eyes neither following nor concerning itself with the footsteps that approach it. Once they announced the coming of prey. But here in its last moments the monster buried in the skin of the old man waits for a silent death.

The splashing stops, the bones skewers that thrust from its shoulders rattle. Clacking together against the interloper. The rattle dying off with its wheezing breath.

“It is not about defeating evil, only doing the right thing.” A female repeats something back to the creature. Its puppet new something of those words, an old man like himself, riding on the back of a white steed.

The Lord of La Mancha

The creature shakes its brittle spines, clacking like wood on the side of a house.

“To dream the undreamable dream, to love chaste and from afar… he knew all the lines, but, you took him away from me.”

The voice comes closer mixing with the water that drops next to its ear.

“To reach the unreachable star,” The female’s voice resends past the rippling droplets.

“I am the lord of La Mancha,” the host’s tongue responds with the croaking of a dying man.

“I’m going to help you up now, mostly because of him, a little bit of guilt, and… it’s not about winning. Not according to him anyway.”

The spine’s that grow out of its arms sew into the female as she scoops up the sack of bones she once knew.

“Phttt!” the parasite growls.

“No need to be rude,” the female drags its dead legs across the rubbish and scraps of the alley. Shrugging as the spine’s wind their way into her arms, “Stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” she says swiftly kicking its feet as she shoulder’s  the remnants of an old friend over her shoulder, “ Think not of the world as it is but as it should be, I hear you old dude I hear you,”

“The greatest insult to a writer,” its pale face and empty eyes turn toward the female, a complex but strange impulse ran through it, a trillion nerves and membranes firing at once.

“Is to see the world as it is, and not.”

“As it should be.”

“That’s what he said,” the female says adjusting her load, “mind the spikes.”

Trillions upon Trillions of neurons fire back through the thing that beats and pulses within the caviar of the old man, its tail wrapped around his spine.

A very inhuman thought passes through it aided by the lonesome pondering of a senile man.

Its voice croaks out, “I am Don el Quixote the Lord of la Mancha.”

Invisible to its unseeing eyes the girl smiles.

“Destiny calls.”

Her voice echoing through its mind the creature’s gravelly voice gains a pride and bravado unknown to host and parasite.

“Through the Wild winds of Fortune, Destiny Calls!” It gasps at the wind as the girl drags it down the alley way, an ember kindling inside the dead man.