A grisly renewal

[femurlord 3751]

 

Sunken in mud and blood, twisted beneath the roots of the marshland, Daisuke appeared disheveled after his grisly detransformation—beaten, as in many hunts before. But this time was different.

His eyes were gouged, his face singed by fire; the pain reached into the pit of his soul. Agonizing in a pool of blood—his own and others’—he tried to reconcile with his loss, his pain, before rising with a roar. The darkness he now saw was all-consuming. The void left by his stolen sight became muddied with his unnatural senses.

Lost in blindness, Daisuke felt the muggy air wrap around him: the mix of salt and freshwater stinging his skin. He smelled nature at war with itself—and at odds with him. Even crippled, life fled; it detested him. The swamps watched the cursed man writhe and struggle at their banks. Frogs and birds fell into silence. Larger prey buried themselves in ruts of mud. Everything scattered, wary of the danger he radiated—even blind.

Amid his pained whines, fresh from his transformation, Daisuke’s sightless world became a maddening blur as his other senses surged to compensate. The air tasted of copper and mildew. Each breath dragged in rot and salt—muddy decay threaded with metallic hints of the distant sea.

Despite the fleeing wildlife, the flies did not abandon him. Like a lazy constellation, they swirled around the rot he brought. Each beat of their wings buzzed like static in his skull. Slowly, the darkness behind his eyes shifted. In his cries, it swirled and took shape. In his absent wails, monsters formed—blurred by grief, by failure, by the blood that stained him head to toe and chummed the swamp waters. With that brine came his oldest fear: the fear of hunters. The fear of becoming prey.

He called out to the Daemons. He called out to the Betrayer. He called out to God. And he called out to worse.

Was his cause not just? Was it not enough to be spared?

Wolvish silhouettes gathered in the black just ahead. Scrambling up the muddy bank, mud clung to his hands as he floundered, his wounds aching and bleeding. Tired and ragged, beaten and worn, the scents around him—real or imagined—grew overwhelming. Panic swelled. Before he could process the confusion, it struck.

Pain tore through him. His flesh was rent. Bones shattered. Bestial groans and ragged huffs filled the air around him. In his suffering, he felt many—fewer than a dozen—but their presence flooded his senses: a collage of emotions, thoughts, agony.

Then, nothing.

Daisuke was gone in an instant. A former hunter claimed by the laws of nature. And yet, in what should have been misfortune, something answered his prayer.

Death did not greet him with the promised nothingness. Instead, his reality twisted, fixed upon the scene of his end.

In the shallows of the bog, five faceless abominations gnawed at guts and shards of bone, scavenging what was left of their kill. These five horrors—outcasts—left only a bloody mush. Then from the deeper swamp, a lanky wretch emerged, and with a wave of his hand, lulled the monsters to heel.

He walked like a man, but bore the shape of something else. Necklaces of ears, belts of knucklebones, pouches of herbs and tinctures adorned his bare form. A trophy-gatherer. A sage. Eyeless, his face hidden behind a mosaic of hollowed, broken skulls. The sage posed himself above what remained of Daisuke.

From this fixed vantage, Daisuke—still a hostage to this vision—watched the moment draw to a close. The sage beckoned. With a guttural rumble and a splash of snake oil and burned sage-bush, a command were spoke:

“Barog.”

Pain birthed Daisuke once more. From the bloody puddle that was once his body, a newly formed hand emerged. Then a gasping head. As if a damned soul rising from the depths, he dragged himself from this grotesque rebirth and before taloned feet.

Strangely, the blind Daisuke could see again, to witness his company and bloody baptism.

He stared at his bare, blood-stained flesh, frantic, before lifting his gaze to the towering figure looming over him and the five hellhounds at his flanks. With a guttural chortle, the being spoke in a primal tongue, its voice echoing through the hollow of a wolf’s skull it wore:

“Dol sin, agash geish. Eiresh geish. Ol’vagr.”

Though Daisuke did not understand the words, he knew their meaning. As the being pressed blood to his forehead, scrawling an illegible, cursed rune, Daisuke felt his purpose change.

Shadowed by beasts and cloaked in dread, the prophet-like figure gave one final command—a single word that consumed Daisuke’s vision in black:

“Dehr.”

He awoke with a jolt, hands slick with brackish water and mud as they gripped and pushed his body upward. The memory clung to him—the agony, this vision—as his frantic hands patted his body in disbelief.

The man and beasts were gone. Only the empty wilds remained.

Calm surrounded Daisuke. Yet an urge gripped him. As if guided by some cursed intuition, he pulled at the scraps that clothed him, tearing a strip from his leggings and wrapping it tightly around his head.

Covered though his eyes were, the black began to fill with light.