Hindmost - Another Word for Chaos

6: Lovecraft

Discord slowly strolled down the hillside, considering her options. The last ten days or so had been remarkably fruitless. In the end it had only been a hope, an assumption that Jiunichi might live near where he preformed his rituals, but after searching three of the closest cities, she'd given up on that idea. Restless, she'd taken to these little excursions almost nightly, keeping track of her little side project. She found him that night, tucked in a nook at the base of a tree. For the most part, he'd been making good time, well past the foot of the mountain now and into a forest along the base. All things considered he was setting quite a pace, but he was also getting worse.

"Hey kid," she knelt beside him, placing a small lunch box next to her leg, "How's it today?"

Discord set about doing a quick examination, taking note of a heightened pulse with an erratic beat, a gray discoloration in his face, black marks around the eyes. She grabbed his arm, his skin was cold, clammy, and the muscles felt soft and yielding.

"Atrophied," she surmised, nodding, "Fuck, you know, I figure you would've killed a goat by now or something," she glanced around at the empty landscape, "Yeah, I guess that was kind of an oversight on my part," she tilted his head back so that he was facing her, "Okay, I need you to understand here, I can't feed you anything, alright, at this advanced stage anything I gave you would just get stuck and....rot, and if I tried to give you something to drink, you'd likely choke, so...I've been reading up on blood doping."

She cringed, pausing in her explanation as he let out a soft groan.

"Yeah-yeah, I know, this probably wouldn't work on a normal person, but, well, we're not normal, and I figured...what with me being Divinity and all, well-um, Pagan Divinity...and..." she grumbled, frustrated with herself, "Gods, here's the deal, I'm gonna drain some of your blood, and after I do that, I'm going to put some of my blood inside you and, just to be clear, it might...kill you, but, if you continue on the way you are, you're gonna die anyway, because, eventually you're not gonna be able to stand, so, if you agree, remain silent, or...you can....say something?"

She waited a few moments, the only noise he made was to continue breathing in a labored fashion. Discord nodded, and set about her tools, plastic tubes and needles which she stuck into his arm and began the bloodletting, stabbing another into her own wrist to draw out her blood. She waited as golden ichor slowly filled the plastic cylinder and fell out the end before affixing the needle to the other side. She halted briefly before sticking the needle into his other arm, feeling a strange sense of permanence, almost like she was slipping on a wedding ring.

"Should I say...something?" she wondered, "I mean it's not like we're about to get...you know, or like we're going to do the...Other...Thing....Does this make you my Grand Priest?"

She looked at his impassive face and was again struck by the depth of his affliction.

"Or are you just the dumb fuck who's going to die if I don't do something," Discord surmised, finding a vein and slipping a needle into it, "So do it already."

Discord leaned against the tree next to him, gazing off into the darkness as her blood drained into his veins.

"Don't worry," she glanced over, "No criticisms tonight, I get it, this is kinda my fault, you can hate me if you want, go ahead, I won't judge...." She paused, "Oh, uh, Hey, Ekland, we were...trying to clean the floor the other day and he drank a whole bucket of cleaner, oh Gods, we thought he was gonna die," Discord openly laughed, "It was...scary, tell the truth, it freaked us out?"

She chuckled, looking to swaying branches above, listening to the distant sounds of the animals foraging and hunting.

"The house is....almost livable now," she went on, "Got some chairs, pillows for the couch, course we're still living off of fast food, can't really figure what to do about two-hundred pounds of ground human meat, and Linus is too much of a wuss to store anything fresh with it in the fridge."