[PAST]
It is a dark room.
(It was, it was a dark room.)
Dust and grime coat the floor. There are others there with the girl, and they are crying. But she does not. The smell of sweat, dog, and blood is rank in the air, rank as the creatures, tall and twisted, who move around them, peering, testing. He hears one of the Garous utter the curse, hears a small child's cry, but the gleam of flaxen hair has caught his eye.
Her skin is already an ashen gray, but he points at her anyway, points and they take, pulling the thin, feeble thing out from the muck, the dirt, the grime.
One of the beasts states the price, but that is a score to be settled later—now what is more important is the spirit remaining and its usefulness.
"Do you think she will do?" he asks the six-armed man, who taps on the rim of his spectacles, peering at the crumpled creature with clinical curiosity.
"There should be enough in there to sustain you for another couple of centuries, Your Grace."
The king nods, but curiosity prods at him, itches on the tips of his fingertips, a question lingering in the dark corners of his mind. It is a quiet whisper of instinct he's learned to follow, and he steps forward to give chase.
He hesitates, fingers lingering in the air just below her tucked chin, he hesitates, because something feels different in this moment. He's taut, compelled forward but recoiling back and this strange foreboding trickles along his spine like ice.
What—?
"Your Grace?"
His fingers touch her face.
It's him, his body, splattered in a halo of blood, twisted and tangled in odd angles, still but for strange rustling—
It's Borthog, on the mountain, old and screaming from the betrayal, the rage at what he, his young apprentice, would do, would dare to take—
They are rats, rats—
A woman with blond hair and eyes of ice, staring out at him from the fragmented glass of the cracked mirror, beautiful and terrible—
"What have you done," Borthogwhispers, mouth full of blood. "What have you said, you stupid boy, you will regret this—"
They're crawling everywhere, squeaking, weaving through his garments—
A face, her face, in the moonlight, pink and sad, her hand in his, soothing, soothing—
Beady, black eyes... clutching, scrabbling paws—
Pale hands in the dark—not his hands—on her shoulders, pulling her back, blood trickling where he touches her—
They are in his eyes, crawling out of his mouth—
If I am to die, she whispers, will you let it be by looking in the mirror?
They've wormed down under his skin, peeling everything back—
YOU ARE READING
The Rat King
ParanormalHe dubbed himself the Rat King when he foresaw the rodents crawling on his corpse, weaving in and out of his garments like a sensation, like a disease. Now he waits for them down in the ornate sewer home he fashioned. It is a fickle thing, the premo...
