(Even as a kid, I felt wrong...)
"One must not tamper with the land,"
"One must not take more than what one needs from the land,"
"One must not seek power beyond the land’s gift,"
"Sigils are for royal blood alone,"
"One must not create what the land didn’t, they’re unholy creations,"
"One must not change their design."
(No parents... no friends, the closest to a relationship I could call was my teachers... but even still,)
Her teachers forced her to recite the six unbreakable laws daily—over and over, until the words dissolved into senseless noise, until her voice turned hoarse and her hands cracked and bled from their punishnts.
The other children laughed at her blank, hollow stare. They called her cursed. Alien. Freak.
But beneath their sneers, she knew they were afraid.
And why shouldn’t they be?
"Hello, little guy," she muttered, staring down at the sickly rodent curled at the base of a tree, its matted fur trembling as it sought warmth.
She knelt, her tiny hands encasing the creature’s frail body, pulling it close against her chest.
"Where have your parents gone?" she pondered aloud, her gaze sweeping the forest floor more for herself than the shivering thing in her arms.
She combed through the underbrush, her small hands pushing aside branches and clawing through tangles of vines with slow, deliberate care.
The rodent’s breaths hitched against her skin, shallow and rapid.
"Don’t worry... I’ll find them."
She stood, her footsteps crunching softly over the leaf-strewn path as she followed the faint trail of clawed prints pressed into damp soil.
The tracks led her deeper into the trees, where sunlight dared not linger.
It didn’t take long.
She halted at the edge of a small clearing—silent, too silent.
Not even the wind stirred.
Veira’s eyes fixed on two broken shapes sprawled on the forest floor.
The corpses of the rodent’s parents lay stiff and torn open, their insides exposed like wilted flowers turned inside out.
Ribs jutted like snapped twigs; intestines spilled in glistening loops, and tiny hearts sat skewered by splintered bone.
Flies sward in sluggish spirals above them, their drone a low, wet hum that filled the air like a funeral dirge.
The girl didn’t scream.
She knelt.
The rodent squird in her grasp, its cries sharp and raw, too large a sound for such a small creature.
Veira stared—unblinking, unflinching—as her trembling fingers brushed the cold, gaping chest of one corpse.
No warmth.
No flicker of life.
Just at and gristle.
Sothing about that felt wrong.
And yet... fascinating.
She gently placed the living rodent beside its dead parents, but it whimpered and clawed its way back into her lap, burrowing into the folds of her skirt.
"So many parts... all of it," she murmured, her gaze tracing the jagged edges of the creature’s spine where it pierced its own heart. "Keeps us going..."
Her hand drifted to her stomach, streaking old blood across her shirt as her grip tightened on the fabric.
(We’re all just pieces. Strings and knots of flesh. Loops and valves. Why does it just fall apart?)
She studied the tiny carcass, then the shivering creature clinging to her.
Its warmth felt fragile—borrowed ti swaddled in ragged fur.
"If I put you back together..." she whispered, her fingertip tracing the torn rib of the dead rodent. "Would you move again?"
Her voice quivered, not with fear but with a crackling thrill that shortened her breath and quickened her pulse.
The forest around her held its stillness, as if the trees themselves leaned in to listen.
She stood, clutching the shivering rodent tighter. Her eyes lingered on the corpses.
"I won’t forget," she said, and ant it.
On the way back, her thoughts roared. Obsessive.
(Maybe it’s not unholy if no one else sees.)
(If the gods cared, they’d stop death themselves.)
(But they don’t. So maybe I should.)
She quickened her pace, her feet nearly running across the sun-softened earth of her village, her mind seething with questions that gnawed at the laws drilled into her skull:
One must not tamper with the land.
Tamper? Or try to understand it?
One must not take more than what one needs.
And what if what I need is to know?
One must not seek power beyond the land’s gift.
Then maybe the land gave this curiosity.
Sigils are for royal blood alone.
So bleed royal. I’ll take their mark.
One must not create what the land didn’t.
But the land didn’t create blades either, and we use those.
One must not change their design.
What if their design is flawed?
Her fingers flexed, itching to trace the bones left behind in the forest, now surely crawling with flies.
Days passed, and Veira sank deeper into her obsessions—first insects, then fish, then mammals—each experint inching her closer to the almost-human, closer to the secrets coiled inside her own flesh.
She cataloged every fragnt of their anatomy: which organs snuffed life fastest when removed, which veins unraveled the body’s clockwork.
Her instincts scread wrong, but she couldn’t stop.
"Over here! Over here!" a boy cried, waving his hands as his friend, a girl his age, tossed a poorly made ball stitched from scraps of animal hide toward him.
The ball slipped from his rough fingers, bouncing into the thick underbrush of the woods.
"Aw man, really?" the boy groaned, glancing back at the girl, who shrugged helplessly.
They trudged forward, peering under rocks and rustling through bushes.
"We should just split up—" the boy said.
The girl nodded, veering off alone.
She pushed aside a curtain of ferns, squinting in the thin sunlight filtering through the canopy.
Her hands brushed over mossy roots and cold stone, eyes scanning the shadows.
Just as she turned to leave, she spotted sothing—brown and matted—wedged in a hollow between two gnarled roots.
She crept closer.
At first, she thought it was a dead Groundsquirrel.
Then she saw the stitches—coarse, black threads suturing two different pelts into one malford shape. And chanical parts that mimicked their structure, parts made out of wood and rope.
She scread.
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