The War For The Pallid Throne

The Wyrm Father and She Who Wished to Slay Dragons

They came from above. Great serpents with fires raging in their stomachs. We called them dragons and once worshipped them, but mortals soon learned that serving the Great Devourer was a mistake. The dragons too had a depthless hunger and no matter how many children we added to the pyre, their stomachs still growled. Mankind learned from Xerxes and revolted breaking the dragons' wings and skewering their trachea. The eighth mass extinction was caused by those abominations and so they were put to the sword until none remained. But I don't believe they are gone for good. How could they be when the one who created them is the immortal Icarus, the true god of war?

18

No matter how often Persephone struck out upon the sands, the feeling was all the same, a fluttering in her belly, a twitching finger, and yawning, always yawning. Her younger siblings thought she was fearless, seeing her maw split wide in a hapless display of misinterpreted exhaustion or boredom. Yawning was a nervous tick, one she developed as a larva hanging from her mother's vocal cords.

Persephone almost didn't make it, one molted finger short of slipping free and falling into darkness. There would be no escape then, no freedom from mindless instinct and the Devourer's icy embrace. Once, she was nothing; back when her true body was a pale slug without pores or fingers. She fed close to her mother's epiglottis because she adored the taste of lime and iron. That's when she heard her matron's voice, a chime that rang like a silver bell. Something changed when those notes reached her cochlea, the birth of an ephemeral spirit and a desire for independence.

She wanted a voice of her own, something to anchor that intoxicating feeling ripped from hunger's stranglehold, but time was running out. Even as she raced towards the vocal cords to wrap her body around that silver chime, she could feel her spirit slipping away. Like a sputtering flame, she felt herself fading with each passing second.

She was once curious about the feel of those ciliated disks beneath her body, gone.

She was once angry when biting her lip, blood running down her chin, gone.

She was once afraid of losing her grip and forgetting who she was, gone.

When she reached the source of her mother's voice, only slivers of her spirit remained, but they were enough to push her forward. That tiny pale slug quivered when her luminescent digits ripped free; the first pore in her soul. She broke her fingers, scratching violently into her mother's false vocal cords to reach the silver syllables beneath. The flesh felt like rubber pushing but not tearing beneath her onslaught. Soon, her strength faded as the last of that sickly sweet desire dissolved beneath a mountain of hunger.

Lime, that's right, she loved the taste of lime.

Her strength cracked like a twig bent too far as she hung by one finger, eyes growing heavy.

What she wouldn't give for another taste of lime.

With a yawn, she let go, but the tip of her finger caught in the epithelial lining of that false tissue, stretching it so far it tore open. Out of that gaping hole came her mother's voice as she plummeted into the darkness, a sound like a whisper and a kiss before bed.

"Persephone."

At last, the nameless one had a name, and so back came the anger, grief, sadness, joy, and curiosity that pushed hunger away. Her spirit was wrapped in a silk cocoon, and that hollow shell of a pale slug dissolved into dust.

A close call, and one she couldn't forget because there was a scar in her soul that manifested in every vibriatus she claimed as her own. A scar that nestled close to her jawbone and tickled the hypothalamus whenever she was nervous. A scar that drove her to yawn when she stood at the black gates of the first hive, trembled beneath the growing tempest of Xerxes ambition, or stood in the shadow of the true god of war.