banshee.txt

Amion was dead.

Dead. D-e-a-d. Dead. No longer among the living. Gone to Lethe. A corpse.

Dead deadDEADdeadDEAD.

Gone.

Amion was dead, and yet, as Loquacious Dibare held her dead lover clutched to her chest, even as his body grew cold in her arms, the moon still rose, the stars still filled the sky, and, to her utter disbelief -

The sun rose.

Loquacious' heart-rending scream startled the poor horses, and nearly every animal for miles. Amion was dead, deaddeadd-e-a-ddead and the world had the gall to keep going!

The first hour was only to be expected, really, each howl of grief and rage, each sob of bottomless sorrow no more than what would be expected of a woman in mourning for the father of her child, for her first and only love.

The second hour was harder to bear, as Loquacious accepted that a world without Amion was, somehow, a possibility, that the world truly was cruel enough to not take them together.

The third hour, her screams were one of a plea for a happy life for him, burried safely next to her mother.

The fourth hour was enough to convince almost anyone else that she was mad.

And still she kept screaming, curses and oaths and vows of vengeance pouring from her lips. She would rip each star from the sky, rend apart moon and sun both, she would destroy the fabled Yu-Shan, because a world where her Amion could be so ripped from her was not a world worth living in.

Someone familiar with exalts might have expected that first day to be it, yet still she screamed, still she sobbed, still she swore. Those who had committed this heinous crime would pay. She would make each of them suffer as much as she did.

Even the gods would not be safe from her grief. Mortals and gods alike she would destroydevourmakethemsuffer, everyone even tangentially responsible for Amion's death. Celiah could only watch and pray the madness passed soon.

The third day dawned, and the screams continued... Loquacious tore first at her hair, ignoring the seperation of scalp and strand, but by noon it wasn't enough. Nails scrabbled at skin, long red marks left in their wake. Celiah managed to force water into her near sunset, but nothing seemed to stop Loquacious' grief.

And the rending of flesh began.

At first it didn't even register to Loquacious that she had gone from leaving marks on her skin to drawing blood. The claw-marks weren't that noticiable at first, even as the blood began to stain her robes even further.

By dawn, though, they were worse. Furrows, stripped of skin and into muscle were carved into her face, jagged lines from hairline to jaw, and soon her arms began to be clawed as well. The pain was nothing compared to the pain in her heart. The incompetents in Yu-Shan no longer deserved to rule. Amion was deadDEADdeadd-e-a-d and it was their fault and they were going to PAY.

Celiah managed to force food and drink on her again that evening, but the swatting when she attempted to clean the self-inflicted wounds was enough to make her back off. Loquaciou's voice was going.

The fifth day, all Loquacious could do was sob and howl in grief. There wasn't a single person nearby that wasn't haunted by the terrifying sound of a heart utterly rent assunder.

It was during the sixth day that a plan started to form. A crazed plan born of utter exaustion and despair, but a plan nonetheless. There was something inutterably wrong with the world. Those in charge of it were neglectful and incompetent. Her duty was to take charge...

But Amion was deadDEADdead d-e-a-d how could she do anything at all? her scrabling at every inch of her own skin only grew more frantic, tearing down through the muscle now.

It was noon, during the seventh day, that one errant finger scraped away eyelid and slit eyeball. The shriek of pain that escaped Loquacious... Well, have you ever heard of the shriek of the banshee? This shriek, of physical and spiritual pain alike, was the mother of that particular legend.

Celiah, knowing Loquacious quite well, expected her mentor to collapse from exhaustion by the dawn of the eighth day. She did not. Useless flesh dribbling down and into the bloodstained robe and dirt surrounding her, the haunting vision of a woman who had lost the most important thing in the world was written in flesh here. Oaths and screams continued almost with the ripping of fabric and further flesh. Loquacious clutched herself and screamed her defiance to the Sun. It was doomed to fall on deaf ears, even she knew that, but the screams continued anyways.

Amion was deadDEADdead d-e-a-d and Loquacious lived to scream through the ninth day, voice rough and raw, exhaustion and pain and bloodloss making her tremble helplessly as Celiah forced attention on her, forced her to drink and eat, but still Loquacious would not cease her morning.

Perhaps she should have died on the tenth day after her world collapsed, swallowed as effectively as the Neverborn dreamed Creation would. It was only after the last sliver of the uncaring, traitorous Sun slipped below the horizon that Loquacious finally collapsed, unconscious and half-dead, over the grave of her husband.