UNMARKED GRAVES, armin arlert

0. handmaid of the lord

Content Warnings: Child Abandonment, Religious Prose, Dissociation, Suicidal Ideation

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IT BEGAN WITH WATER, like where all things began before lovely bones, where the hands of a merciful God guided your sin-rotten body to purgatory. Death escaped you, once again being shy. When you woke, your instincts flared before anything else. Before you could process that you were not home, before you could pinpoint that your parents were gone without a trace. The skin-tight body you outran against the night that veiled that foreign place, the pulse of your heart that thrashed for release from the confines of your butterfly ribs refusing flight. You ran until dawn bruised your skin, until there was nowhere to run, until you were punctured to the pulp with everything your nerves touched set aflame. But you were body-bound, blood strung, and no matter how much you scratched at your skin to be liberated from this hell, God did not listen. He watched vacantly when you screamed at the sky for your parents, and he watched with a peaceful face when a merchant slapped you to silence, tossing you in an alleyway. Good for nothing, useless, dreg of society. Oh, mischief, you have no home to return to!

God did not do anything when the crowds began to cry, WALL MARIA HAS FALLEN, when anarchy struck the town to a seventh hell. You understood now, like how Rachel wept for her children until they rattled bones, or how Mary stood at the feet of her Son on the cross. Around you, the disordered order of things. The night was day, and the day was night. Faces of fellow humans morphed into salivating beasts. You divorced from this vessel, knees tucked to your chest, hands pillowing your ears as you stared at a weed sprouting in-between the cracks of the concrete. And God? God continued to watch motionless at you from heaven, from that beautiful bleeding sky, your body decomposing in fear, closer to a bag of flesh than any human. You looked back up at him, eyes not empty, but certainly not alive-no, you stared back at him with the dream for death, the awakening of a dream.

You wanted to die. This was the rudimentary truth that your existence amounted to: You wanted to die.

"Hey. Are you awake?"

A swell of sound swam around you, softer than anything you've witnessed. It expanded, expanded, and expanded until it soaked your sunken heart in a second kind of sanctuary. This was what your eyes were telling you: there was a girl before you, and she was holding out a hand. The concept of movement eroded from any manifestation of action. Your thoughts remained as thoughts.

"Momma, she isn't responding to me-"

"Mary, try again. They're still shellshocked. Poor child..."

This is what your eyes were telling you: A woman joined the girl, and she was very beautiful, as though she were cut from the sky. The sunlight slanted, a fleeting halo passing over her head as she extracted a white wash cloth from her pocket. She washed the dried blood you didn't know was even there across your face.

Time blotched when the woman lifted you in her arms. Your comatose mind and disfigured soul, your thoughts went limp and all you knew is that a woman had lifted you in her arms and it was warm. You remained unphased when the woman brings you into a shabby cabin folded away in a crumbling corner of the clustered district of Trost, where she leaded you into a shower room. In the shower room, she cleaned your back; gentler around the bruises, more considerate of the streaks of opened skin. When they adorned you in clothes and lead you to their dining table, a thought crystallises into a sore icicle that punctured your ribcage and clawed up your throat:

"Why are you being so kind to me?"

Your voice barely scratched the air, yet your ugly words curdled into a clump like a stone in your stomach. In a blue of longing, the woman wordlessly broke a loaf of bread into three and placed a portion on your plate. She poured a cup of grape juice, and smiled a smile closer to the margins of a memory, perhaps of your mother.

"Welcome home, (your name)."

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Content Warnings for the Story:

Body Horror, Blood, Cannibalism, Death, Child Endangerment, Extreme violence, Gore, Guns, Monsters, Murder, Parental abandonment, Parental death, Sexual assault (Mentioned)
Sexual assault towards children (Mentioned), Suicide + Suicidal Ideation,
Swearing. Chapters will include trigger warnings when necessary.