I'm Searching For Fragile Bones
Azag’s memories of where he had been these past few months were scattered, broken things, but he knew pain well. He had come to know pain early, and had been broken accordingly. He recalled distantly how his captors had reveled in his anguish, how they mocked his godly heritage, and how they laughed at his futile attempts to assert himself. He could no longer remember the faces of his captors but knew that when he had become too large for their continued torment that they had sold him.
He remembered distantly life as a servant, the humiliation and the anger that followed him to sleep in his miserable shelter every night. He remembered his stocky build being admired despite his mistreatment and how it had earned him a place in the fighting pits. He remembered the clashing fangs of wolves and being pitted against other creatures like mountain cats, and boars , for the entertainment of his captors, but this he remembered from a distance, as if he had witnessed it, rather than lived it. In truth he couldn’t say what was real and what was dream, but he remembered the black mouth o the man who came to see him one day.
He remembered seeing a great bulking beast with white streaks in his fur pushing him roughly and urging him forward while he looked back nervously to see if he was being followed. But there was no one.
He had been forced into a boat and the boat had been pushed off a dock and into the darkness. “Don’t fall in!” The man had tittered as he drifted into the darkness. He suspected he was meant to die, but the boat had been supplied with water and dried meat. It was strange, an odd act of kindness that he couldn’t fathom. The sea was mild but birds continually tried to steal his supplies and instead became supplies themselves. He remembered those days at sea, drifting listlessly in the wind and baking under the hot sun, his scars aching and stinking with pus and infection.
He cleaned his wounds as best as he could with salt water but it stung terribly and burned enough to make him tremble, yet he hadn’t died. He remembered his boat crashing against the rocks of a shore and being too weak to do anything other than lay in the sand for a time and eat the crabs that ventured too close to him. How long had it been? Weeks? Months? A season? He couldn’t say, but it was by mere chance that one day a scent carried on the wind that brought him to a castle. It was a familiar scent, one he had smelled on the man, one that made his heart ache with longing. Abraxas. The scent whispered in his mind and he felt his spirits lift. But no, he told himself, it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t know him, they wouldn’t recognize him.
And so he turned away, and made his way back to the coast, back to be consumed and eaten by carrion feeders until nothing of his miserable existence remained. He would simply disappear. But the fallen god it seemed had other plans for him, and as the wolf approached him a single name came to him from the recesses of his mind, he spoke it like a prayer, his voice rough and cracked from disuse.
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