My Mother Divinity [Unedited]

Introduction

My Mother Divinity
Morgan Forbes

[Instagram account for concept art related to this book is under @morganforbesart. NaNoWriMo 2020.]
Be mindful for descriptions of torture/animal abuse/human sacrifice.

It feels like life after death. Pain was all I knew before now, flashes of carvings into my skin, burned into my brain. Physical sensation envelopes my memories like a hot glove until the doorway to my suffering has opened, quite literally, and I'm pulled out of it all.

A world outside bathed in a red glow, fluorescent, like the inside of a womb. The perfect tinge of warmth and comfort that beckons me out from the black box I've come to know.

A silhouette of a man, his sleeves rolled up, formidable marks striped across the inner crooks of his elbows. I think they look familiar but I don't have time to be afraid before he takes my arm.

"Out you come," he grumbles, yanking on my bony wrist to encourage me up the stairs. Out in the artificial light, I think there's something wrong with the skin that wraps around my forearm, and the knuckles that have been sanded down around my fingers. Little white and pink lines, strange patterns - deliberate and careful and artistic, like his.

He sees me studying myself and directs me out of the light again. "Don't worry about that." What I'm worried of is being thrust back into darkness and I make this known, retracting my wrist and stumbling towards the light.

He sighs and relents. "It's alright."

What's alright? I don't have a name, memories, the voice to speak. I don't think I can force a response out if I tried. He hasn't told me shit.

For the first time I see blood on the floor, buckets of thick treacle-like liquid that in this colour of red, appears like a black death. Men lie on the concrete with their throats slit.

"It's alright," the stranger says again. He leaves for a moment and surrounded by the stale heat of the corpses, I feel more alone than I ever have before. A fear of big open spaces, I suppose, which is hardly surprising.

He comes back with a chair which he drags to a table; this looks like the kitchen of a house. How impossible to think that all this time I was locked in somebody's basement. I stare at the bodies without sympathy and sit on the chair.

"I need to have a look before we leave," the man says and I stare at him, dumbfounded.

He gestures to my shirt, the thin piece of cotton that hangs off my torso like a rancid sack. "What are you waiting for? Take it off."

I don't know what he wants to have a 'look' at but too weak to argue, too unimaginative to think of anything worse happening beyond what has already, I do as he says. The shirt comes off and the smell of my unwashed body becomes obvious. I look at myself and see the bones of my chest, and more scars.