Call of Duty Oneshots (Mostly Ghost)

A Preacher's Daughter

(disclaimer: contains sacrificial elements, blood, and a sprinkle of sacrilegious undertones.)

There you crouch.

On your knees, covered in dirt and smears of blood staining your perfect skin.

Just below your trembling frame, a design drawn in your own blood as your sacrifice lay in the middle, a dead lamb with a long gash along its neck that your scarlet hands created.

Hands that have never witnessed such violence, but there you were, a preacher's daughter now a butcher.

A good girl you'd always been. Never a hair out of place nor uttered a single curse word in front of a soul.

Always so pristine and immaculate, your clothes you wore were uncharacteristically soiled with dirt from a freshly dug grave and blood from the innocent animal you'd slayed with a sharpened knife made of silver.

Your doubtful lips had prayed the necessary words to summon him.

An enigma mortals could not fully fathom.

Elusive and subjective, all knew he existed but none knew how exactly.

No one had ever seen Death wear blood and flesh and lived to tell the tale, but you'd been itching for years to defy the odds ever since learning that summoning a god was even possible.

But you'd never had the stomach to do it once you read the requirements. Until now. You didn't know what came over you, but the yearning burned in your veins as if something or someone were calling you. Summoning you instead of the other way around.

Expecting a swirl of dark mist or a cloud of mystery or something resembling a scene out of a movie, the surprise of how this deity comes to life quickened your heart with each passing second.

The blood that had turned room temperature on the ground bubbled almost like a soup boiling on a stove, as if it hadn't been spilled half an hour ago.

An invisible force pulled the rivers of crimson inward – the beginnings of a tsunami – while the sounds of cracking bones perked your ears in disgust.

Once all of the spilled blood returned to its original owner, you couldn't bear to watch the subsequent steps, the squelches and snaps were enough to fill your throat with nausea.

Rendered unable to witness the horrors of what you'd done as you thought the imaginable was impossible, your eyelids remained squeezed shut until everything stilled.

Slowly, you swept your gaze upward and found a figure standing before you.

Wearing nothing but a white, wool robe, there he stood where the cursed ceremony had just taken place.

Death.

Beneath the garment, he looked just as a man would with warm flesh and hair. If only you could see his face. Tied around his head was half a skull that covered the top half of his face so the only thing you could perceive was his clean-shaven jawline and thin yet smirking lips.

Not a muscle twitched in fear when he stepped towards you, and you hardly blinked when his hand cupped your jaw. It surprised you when you didn't just drop dead at his touch. You certainly didn't expect someone as powerful as him to be so... gentle.

"Look at you..." he purred, fingertips digging a little deeper into those flushed cheeks of yours. "A little lamb of my own." Death paused as he inspected every inch of you that he was allowed. "Question is..."

Your breath hitched as he forced your chin up to the ceiling, but you couldn't look away.

A person's eyes could not simply look away from Death when it stared them right in the face and had them in its clutches.

"What good is innocence in the hands of a god like me?"