Roll (2): Prompt 3

A loved one provides a Resource

Thieda is the one to find my walking corpse. The shadow of a tree engulfs me, but the sound of my hunger, sickly-wet, leads her to me. I look up, face wet with the lifeblood of some small creature. On my hands, down my front, mingling with my own cold congealed death. The creature’s last fluttering heartbeat sings to me, my mouth is drawn to it again, and I drink. 

I hear her gasp, a sharp, sudden cry. I feel her heartbeat quicken. My eyes flicker-fast back to hers. The terror in her eyes stops me sudden, and she rushes to me. Throws her arms around me– hot with the sun, burning, her love for me too bright.  She feels the cold in my body, her hands go to the wound in my neck, her eyes crystal with tears. I feel the life in her, but force myself to reign back the darkness that has consumed me since my dear bright-haired Hrodulf was so similarly overcome.

Thieda stays with me in the shadows until they extend across a night sky that is suddenly luminous. She brings me home, slow, careful, out of the eyes of the village; she lays me in her own bed, closes me in that dark sweet space and hushes my whimpering like ours mothers once did. She brushes my hair, unweaving the flowers meant to adorn me for my wedding, washes my face, my hands, and tries to tend to my neck.

Soon, I am feverish again with hunger. She brings me chickens, first dead, then live when their flesh offers me no succor. I have no words for her. She will not wish to hear about the strength of her pulse and the smell of her skin when she is near,  my sudden need, the wild thoughts in my mind. I have only hunger that is barely satiated with this chicken blood, and the kiss of my betrothed laying open the path to my heart. 

Roll (1): Prompt 4

escape, leaving most behind (lose stationary resources, check a skill)

I am feeling more myself, though every day is an aching hole in my chest as I am left alone, and every night a struggle not to give in, not to tear open the neck of my dearest Thieda and do to her what Hrodulf has done to me. Why does she stay? Why did she not flinch away? Thieda tells me I am a Miracle of God, and my hunger must surely fade as life returns to me. Some days, I think about believing her.

It does not take much time before a discovery is made. There are only so many chickens, and the servant girl who replaced me cannot be kept from Thieda’s bedchambers forever, whether or not she proclaims herself in mourning. Thieda sleeps next to me on the first cold morning at season’s end; every heartbeat blinding me with longing I will not–must not–shall not! give into. I watch her chest rise, and her pulse’s slow rhythmn keeping her dream’s time.

The bed-curtains are thrown back, a flood of light blazing upon us, fire to my skin. A familiar face with no name wears an expression that twists from polite intrusion to horror, eyes fixed on the space where flesh once belonged to my neck, red and raw.

Before I can stop her– the urge to pounce, to tear into her instead, to finally drink what is mine by marriage right after all!!– she has fled, screaming for a priest. Thieda snaps awake as I leap from the bed, grabbing what little we can and tumbling out the back of the house before the chaos of the screaming can settle.

The world becomes a whirlwind of the deep reds of a cloak I managed throw on on against the sun, urgent movements and moments, pressed together in small spaces, silent, Thieda’s breath held tight, where mine no longer exists. Finally, the safety of the woods as night falls and concerned voices fill the town, calling for Thieda. Some, uncertain, call for me.

We will go North. To a larger place, a city, somewhere we can slip unnoticed through the world. 

Thieda’s hand does not leave my hand. How long can I ignore the call of my hunger to her?