Evie stood on the cliffs, sketching the sea’s black jaws, its waves a churning mass of blood and bone, her eyes hollowed pits, her skin flayed by shadows, weeping blood and pus, her hands trembling as the pencil snapped, shards embedding in her palm, blood dripping onto the page. Cassian watched, free but shackled to her ruin, his arm a rotting stump, flesh sloughing off, maggots wriggling in the wound, his face a mask of grief and madness, blood crusted on his lips. A note bled onto the sketch—her mother’s script, scrawled in gore: Welcome home, my meat. The sea roared, a hungry maw, and she leapt, its cold jaws swallowing her whole, the curse clamping down, suspending her in the abyss—her flesh peeling away in strips, eaten by fish with teeth like razors, her eyes open, sketching with dead hands, her screams a silent wail echoing in the dark.
Cassian dove after her, screaming her name, his voice a shredded thing, but the waves vomited him back, his arm tearing free at the shoulder, blood arcing into the tide, his body broken on the rocks, ribs piercing his lungs, gurgling as he clawed at the sand, her name his last breath before the sea dragged him under too, a twin sacrifice unasked for. The estate pulsed, sated, its shadows retreating, leaving Hollowmere a graveyard of silence.
Years later, a new artist breached the town, her boots crunching over bones washed ashore—Lila’s, Cassian’s, Evie’s—picked clean, scattered like driftwood. The estate loomed, its spires dripping with fresh blood, whispering her name. A figure met her on the cliffs—a woman, eyeless, flesh flayed, sketching with skeletal hands, her voice a hiss from the abyss: “Leave.” She didn’t. The maw opened again, and Evie grinned from the dark, her teeth sharp, her hunger eternal, the sea’s endless feast reborn.
Write a comment ...