Rhodes Island's Psychologist

Ch 1: Chernobog's Pet Doctor

She ran until her muscles burnt under her skin. Until her veins strained against her flesh and became harsh, vile scars cut out from the inside of her body, pushing to burst forth in sicking puddles of red over the earth. Until her feet left bloody, shining crimson marks on the broken streets.

She climbed up hills made from fallen buildings and crushed steel boxes on wheels made to carry men and all their departed wishes. She gripped and crawled over stones, pipes, and wires like some kind of enormous creeping bug...using the hands and feet and heads of the limp, long torn apart and rotting dead within them as very good footstools and ladders. Cresting each by each, all to go deeper into the heart of a long-dead place. 

One that had finally begun to show it's uncountable wounds. The fires in the street were her helpers; guides that warned her were the rage of the men in masks who'd brought down the city screamed loudest! Where they still gnawed and bit and shredded to pieces the last of the few false guards who refused to accept the truth. Who ignored the flames and their message; who were deaf to the death of Chernobog.

Yet she ran: It was she who could hear them. Who could listen and know their portent, the cold and awful omen coming about right before her eyes, and in exchange for her ear? They helped her. They gave light to the hidden places in this new and mangled land. Showed her the true paths throughout the song of screams for carnage and deliverance that abounded wherever you went. And, from the tops of buildings, or the bodies that littered the ground she walked, they would burn without end.

Burn, and burn, and burn. Burn, and tell her the way.

She saw the black stone of the building. She could taste the fresh blood on the air, but she ignored it. She saw his throat, but she ignored it. She knelt by his side, took the boy of eight years in her arms, and set the bag of food she'd stolen in the madness in front of him.

Feed him? What dead man can open his mouth to eat? Yet, she tried. Took bread, chicken sandwiches, his favorite-chocolate cake to his mouth, and he was still.

Speak? Show me a dead man who can talk, and I will show you the greatest liar in all the world. Yet, she would not face the truth. She talked at length with him! Spoke about all the games they'd played and the lands they'd imagined in the decrepit, disgusting pits of rubbish and shit they'd called home in the alleys and sewers of the city. 

Of all the wounds she'd taken for him and others; as the false bastards that called themselves protectors drank heavily that thing that kings make in their most wretched and mad hours, and give to the people as poison. That thing that once given but a drop, brought them to strike and kill and maim their own children. The children of their realm. The children of their lands. The children of their own labors and hopes!

She would speak of all of this and so much more, and he was still.

Ah, then-she did all that was left. All that she had left to her: she gripped his cooling body in her arms, she cried without end, and she prayed. Prayed and called out to the heavens for all that the earth had taken from her. She promised herself to god! Promised all that she was and all that she would ever be, all that she knew and all that she felt, to him. 

To let God do all that she'd seen men who lived in the dark places do with women they took from their homes in the dark hours or anything else he desired. She promised to even give all the world to God, to display all of the treasures and possessions of the world at his feet no matter the cost, should he return to her arms the one thing she had kept alone, in all her time on this earth.

Yet only the ever-burning flames were there for her; only their eternal promise, for greater tragedy. Greater horrors to soon come was her response. What happened next?