A Cursed Newborn and the Blessed Venoms
From a place deemed so insignificant that it was never named, bred cruelty and tyranny. It was a place that wailed all night and all day. Either from those unfortunate enough to call that place home, or from the frequent storms that crashed onto jagged rocks which claimed an untold amount of lives. Some were sailors who fought against the tide and the winds, others from the people who could no longer bear life in such a rotten place.
Cut throats and thieves hid behind every rock and sat in every shadow, waiting for what they considered an easy target to pass by. Power between the gangs rose and fell with every skirmish and hinged on who survived. Some gangs would allow you to live in exchange for valuables, others were cannibals and would settle for nothing less than blood. The worst, however, were the summoned or the reanimated creatures who snatched people off the streets on behalf of their master.
Smoke and ash filled the sky, causing ailments and birth deformities of all manner, and was carried by the wind. Sometimes drowning out any cries for help, other times amplified the violence for all to hear.
The only thing more common than murder and assault was superstition. Though since many of these commonly held beliefs kept people indoors at night, where it was safe, it was impossible to say for certain if it was indeed superstition or just good advice.
The sky above was the color of a bruise still throbbing with pain. Night was drawing near and Otaz did not want to be caught outside. This was a lesson Otaz learned vicariously when he was a boy while listening to the sobbing, screaming and begging from those unfortunate enough to be caught.
His wife was expecting and needed medicine, which he held inside of a dried gourd that the local herbalist had filled. She still had a month to go before the baby was to be expected and despite the fact that she was strong, this pregnancy was difficult.
Otaz’s wooden hut sat at the top of a long series of steep stairs that were carved into the side of a cliff. He had run these steps all his life, so they did not tire him the way it would for many others.
Outside his hut door Otaz could hear his wife’s muffled groans. To not make too much noise that would attract attention from the scavengers she had a shirt sleeve between her teeth and was screaming into it.
“Regina?” Otaz asked, confused, as he opened the door.
“It’s coming” Regina shouted as quietly as she could in spite of the pain.
Otazs head was spinning. She still had another month to go.
For the next few hours the couple did what they could to bring new life into their cursed world. At some point during the birth his wife’s muffled cries became silent and without looking up, Otaz knew she was gone.
“Regina?” Otaz asked, hoping for a reply.
Silence.
“Regina? Tell me what to do” Otaz asked, a tear rolling down his face even though his mind had not yet come to terms with what happened. “I don’t know what to do. What should I do?”
As the first tear swelled on the tip of Otazs nose, something moved in Regina’s belly.
It was the baby. Alive and trying to escape.
Knowing what had to be done didn’t make it any easier, and Otaz let out a single sob before leaning over to kiss his wife for the last time.
“I’m sorry” he whispered before slipping the knife out of its sheath to cut his baby out of its mothers womb.
Otaz didn’t know exactly how to go about this horrible act, but that didn’t stop him. This needed to happen if the child was to live.
By the time he was done the hut looked like a butcher’s workshop, but his son was alive. Breathing air into its tiny lungs with eyes that matched his mothers, dark and shining with hope.
Otaz held the baby tight for a few moments before the thought occurred to him. The scent of blood in the air would attract the city’s vermin and vultures who were always looking for weaknesses to exploit. A mewling child, unable to defend itself, qualified as a weakness.
There was time for him to run with the newborn, but nothing could be done about Regina. She would have to stay behind, hopefully her remains would keep others too preoccupied to follow him.
After all, when dead, people are just meat.
They wouldn’t stop at her though. If he and the baby were still around, they would be the next meal.
Panicking, Otaz wrapped the child in a sheet and silently slipped into the shadowy streets, hoping against hope that the child remained silent.
Without a destination in mind, Otaz kept moving and soon found himself beside the unguarded city walls. Even though he was no soldier he knew it being unguarded was strange, however he wasn’t about to question it. He knew the guards were just as bad as the gangs and wouldn’t think twice about selling a baby to a butcher for a few pieces of copper.
Assuming the reason for his escape was so easy was because the guards had been asleep, Otaz thanked Ferisha, the goddess of fate.
Little did he know her hands were clean of everything that would occur that night.
Otaz ran into the woods long rumored to be occupied by demons and witch cults. But he didn’t care, his child, the last part of his wife he had, couldn’t live in the same place it was born. At least a solitary life in the woods would mean safety.
He ran until he could no longer see the city lights behind him, then he ran up and down four more hills just to be sure. The child never made a sound and Otaz had to check on him just to be sure he was still breathing. His son was peacefully sleeping each time he looked and wouldn’t make a sound until Otaz placed the baby down beside a tree stump in the middle of a clearing. He had been running all night and needed some rest.
“Hungry?” Otaz asked, wondering how he was going to feed the child.
The more he thought about it the more he wondered if running off into the woods was the best thing for the two of them. He could have sold it to the wetnurses in the whorehouses, at least they would be able to feed the boy. Of course doing that would mean relinquishing the child and Otaz couldn’t do that to the last part of Regina he had.
Leaving the child behind so he could look for something for both of them to eat, Otaz walked into the dark woods. His child’s cry would guide him back.
Otaz never noticed the six dark figures circling the treeline around the clearing.
He was fortunate to find something to eat as soon as he did: Three tiny eggs deep inside of a hollow tree. He didn’t have a way to cook them. Even if he did, a fire would give away his position. So instead he plopped two raw eggs into his mouth, crunching the shells between his teeth.
Since the child was too young for solid food and Otaz didn’t have any other options for it, he pulled the third egg apart over the child’s, letting the yoke drip into its mouth.
Even in the moonlight, Otaz could see the blood in the yoke as it fell. As soon as the blood touched the baby’s lips, its eyes opened and it stopped crying. The look on its face seemed to say it wanted more.
“What did I do?” Otaz asked himself, thinking about the stories told around the fires as a boy. The ones where the world was destined to end.
In the stories that foretold doom, a baby would be born under a purple sky. It would be covered in its mothers blood and it would feed on blood before milk. According to the tales, the blood will fuel the child’s rise to power where it is destined to destroy the world.
Sometimes the tale involved the newborn to have a tail or a horn, but not always. Sometimes the child was free of defects, just like his own.
At the time these stories were his favorites, but not after what he had just done.
“No” Otaz said, shaking his head violently. “No!” he swore as he pulled the knife from his sheath.
He could hear his wife telling him to kill the baby, that it was cursed. He didn’t want to but he was raised to believe that if he didn’t the world would end and believed it to be true with all of his heart.
Just before the dull knife was thrusted down, everything went every shade of purple. The cursed color associated with malevolent magic.
An unseen force crept into Otazs head like a curious octopus latching onto a boat searching for something. It didn’t take long to find what it was seeking and when it did, it immediately took control of Otaz’s hands.
Otaz could only watch as his own hands flayed his own newborn.
He tried screaming, but the only thing that came out was humming. The tune he had never heard before and was alien to mortal ears, but familiar in a primal sense.
He heard others in the woods joining in with the song, but couldn’t take his eyes off what he was doing no matter how hard he tried. He was not in control of his actions, but was still able to think and judging from how damp his cheeks were, cry.
His hands moved deftly with the blade as though he had done this before, slicing off large sheets of skin. The arms, the legs, the head, the front and the back.
It was all over in less than ten minutes and the child had gone limp by the time he was done with the left leg.
Utterly broken, Otaz was released from whatever power took over him. He only had a moment of freedom before an unseen assailant silently approached him from behind, placed their hand on his neck and dragged talon-like fingers over it.
The three cuts could barely be seen, not until the mysterious figure pulled Otazs head back, opening the wounds like gills and allowing the blood to cascade onto the freshly flayed infant.
The last thing Otaz experienced was not grief for the future he could never have, or anger for his actions not being his choice. The last thing Otaz experienced was the terror of seeing his child open its now purple eyes and cry. Not out of pain, but out of defiance of death itself.
When there was no more use for the corpse, it was discarded. Otaz had served his purpose.
Hands more akin to a chickens foot with long talons reached out for the newborn and gently picked it up, placing it against its cloak.
“Shh” the being said with a tongue that wasn’t originally made to speak in any mortal language. “We’ll take care of you.”
Around her, more robed figures emerged from the dark. Most were searching for any bits of flesh they could find. Each and every piece was given to their elder, a mortal woman who was busy carving runes on the inside of every scrap given to her.
“Every piece” she said. “Hurry and I’ll let you sew it back on.”
Soft giggles emerged from the other robes.
The baby made an infernal sound that made everyone stop what they were doing and look at it.
Smiling with lips that shouldn’t be able to move in such a way, the being holding the child said “You will study the way of war. Train under the best tutors and given the blessed venoms. Then, when you are ready to make a pact, you will have the power to do more than just conquer a city or lay waste to a realm. You will have the power to slay the gods.”