The War For The Pallid Throne

Ensnared Leech, Velbrava

I hear that the Sabine people worship leeches. Rumor has it the beasts are the only things left in the Malvasia harbor. They are ravenous, having consumed every living thing beneath the docks. Yet, I'm told they are not cannibals. How is it that leeches with cavernous appetites survive when nothing remains to slake their thirst? I have a mind to travel there, ensnare one of these beasts, and find out. Yet, I'm afraid of what I'll find in a leech's belly. Tufts of hair and the lower jaw of a young girl. Gods have mercy, I hate these primitives.  

7

"What have you done to me!?" Velbrava shouted, clawing at the soft tissue that made up his cell. The walls were smooth, sticky, and felt like rubber snapping back in place when pushed too far.

In this form, he was neither wave nor particle and should've been able to slip through the cracks of any solid matter. Yet, the tissue of a vibriatus was different.

He tried to move through the arterial wall, but the blood pushed back, a current breaking upon his spirit like water on rock. There, closest to the optic nerve, the tight junctions in the epithelial lining were thin. Velbrava almost slipped through, finger-like projections probing the outside until something snapped at his heel. Something that stitched the tissue in his face and tapped on the Sclera.

"Quit struggling," said a voice from above as a black oval disk, the lens, shifted across his cell.

That's right; it wasn't the vibriatus that locked the door but its owner. The tissue resisted Velbrava. He knew something was wrong when he came from the dark place; the organs didn't feel like they should, not warm and embracing but cold and rigid.

He spent too much time sorting through the pink tendrils and the soft vibrating tissue, the cilia, that loosened his grip on the skull.

How could Velbrava have been so foolish? This vessel already had an owner, but he was desperate for a place in this war and blind to the thing that wriggled above him; A porous light that hung like cobwebs with a faint blue aura, the corona of the Pallid Throne.

Icarus had tasted the throne many times, that was clear from his coat's sheen and mane's breadth. They were like the soft glow of a pale star and a vast boiling sea whose waves hissed upon the shores.

How could he have been so blind? A primordial engineer caught him stealing from the cookie jar. By the time he noticed Icarus's daunting presence, the trap was sprung. The ancient one fell on him from above, a spider wrapping him in luminous threads that ground his soul down like sandpaper scattering fragments of his spirit.

Velbrava was small now, so small he fit within the vitreous humor of the rat king's left eye. A suitable cell for one so foolish; a suitable crib for a newborn babe. This was only his second war, after all.

A mere decade before, and he was no different from the nameless hordes they carve and shape, a larva nesting in the walls of his mother's womb. Her embrace was warm, and the little hairs that scratched his chin tasted like nutmeg, her breath like diesel fuel.

Content and blind in ignorance, he was a nymph, a mudbug that cared little for meaning. So it was, until he sunk his teeth, those black tendrils that make up the underbelly of his spirit, into his mother's glottis.

The tissue didn't taste familiar, not sweet like his mother's epithelial lining, not sour like her mucous membrane, not salty like her adipose tissue, but bitter and rotten. The flavor made Velbrava's digits curl, and the corners of his soul wrinkle like old leather. Yet, he came back for more. Driven by instinct he didn't yet understand, he drove his fangs into the glottis. Then, a hole appeared, and he could hear something beneath the tissue, a voice calling out.