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rainbowfic2024-02-06 02:29 pm
ilthit) wrote in rainbowfic2024-02-06 02:29 pm
Iridium #4, Newsprint #24: Paradise (Tanhua the Vampire)
Name: Paradise
Story: Tanhua the Vampire
Colors: Iridium #4 (there's no bad publicity), Newsprint #24 (How concise that you can cry from awful wounds, desertion, happiness, memories, humiliation, disappointment, or grandeur.)
Supplies and Styles: chalk (Two Nations, a Horrible Accident, and the Urgent Need to Understand the Laws of Space), stain (There are years that ask questions and years that answer. - Zora Neale Hurston) stickers (sloths can hold their breath underwater for up to 40 minutes); chiaroscuro, sculpture
Word Count: 940
Rating: teen
Warnings: Violence, murder.
Summary: Tanhua finds a home, for a while.
Note: Completed Iridium! 🙌
*
There may be no place under Heaven where a monster like myself belongs.
I did not know that on my second, third, or fourth night of being this creature of the other side of life, and as months passed on, I gave up looking for certainty and settled for a place to hide.
I ran into the woods, as I have written before; and I kept running until I had put a small nation's worth of forest between myself and humanity. Then I walked and wandered, eating what I could catch, and hiding in burrows from the sun, until I found the cave.
It was not a deep cave. It did not dig into the rock, it had no narrow passageways or distant echoes of dripping water, as some other caves I have known. It was a place where the bone of the world had cracked and fallen back upon itself, solidified into its shape by questing tree roots and tight-packed earth. It was not very different from a stoat burrow, but it was the perfect size for a little human-shaped monster.
The cave stood on a hill above a small spring lake, in which I washed off the dirt of my travels, and then stayed floating and exploring. I noticed frogs hopping on the slippery shore rocks, staring at me with their bulbous wet eyes, and I found their progeny in a little pool under the shade of low-hanging birch branches. I watched the tadpoles wiggle around, and missed the sun and my childhood so badly that it felt like a wound cut right through my abdomen.
I settled into my cave quickly. At first I only put up heavy slates of rock at the entrance, which I could lift easily now with my new-found strength, and added thick piles of pine branches to inoculate my home from sunlight. I slept and slept; I even slept in nighttime, until I woke up at another sunset so hungry for violence that my eyes ached. Then I would go out and hunt whatever I could find, drain its blood and glut myself, leaving the meat for the other animals of the forest.
My rest was delicious, even when winter came, and I would wake up with ice crusted on my chin and my hair in matted icicles. Though the cold did not really hurt me, I did not like being so stiff, so I began to make fires. It was not too difficult, once I had properly dried some collected wood, but I only did it whenever the ice and snow became truly bothersome. The fire made me restless. Some instinct in the back of my head was crying out: fire means danger.
It was not wrong, though I had nothing but instinct to go on, back then. I was careful to dump enough snow on the fire when it was time to put it out, and make sure not a single ember escaped.
I soon found work to occupy myself. I had started my fires by striking stones and by rubbing wood on wood, but now I made myself tools as well. I reinforced my home against the heavy snow that caved in my pine-door at one point and nearly burned me in the sun. I chipped at the walls of my home to make more space, or make beautiful images on the walls. When summer came, I found plants and mixed paints, and made a frame to clean animal skins on, to make cloaks and shirts to cover up my nakedness. It was not a bad life, out there in the dark wood.
It was not bad at all.
I had lived in the cave for several years before I first saw men out in my woods. I hid in the trees and listened to them talk about a fire seen here up on the hill, about a monster who attacked at night and left animals dead but not eaten. In my panic, I wanted to jump at their backs and tear them all apart, but I held back. They had steel weapons on them, and they were all bigger than myself, and there were three of them. Could I really fight them?
Though I was frightened, I could not stand the thought of them taking my home from me, so I followed them silently. When one fell behind, I took him down in one bite on the neck; he let out barely a gasp before he was gurgling and dying on the ground. I dragged the body to the water's egde and dived in, waiting there under the mirror of the lake's black surface for the other two to come looking for him. I drowned the second man; the third put a knife in me, but I got him under my teeth in the end.
I did not know what to do with the bodies. They presented a problem I had no answer to. If the hunters had come here looking for me because they had found foxes and deer killed but not eaten, how much more curious would others be about these human deaths? I put my head in my hands and wept bloody tears. Was I never to know any peace?
It does not do to gather wool forever, however, especially when the sun is lurking just behind the horizon. I washed my face and hands and returned to my cave, and the next night I set about making traps, but work as I might, I knew that my beautiful home, and the innocence of my youth, was bound to come to an end, and soon.
Story: Tanhua the Vampire
Colors: Iridium #4 (there's no bad publicity), Newsprint #24 (How concise that you can cry from awful wounds, desertion, happiness, memories, humiliation, disappointment, or grandeur.)
Supplies and Styles: chalk (Two Nations, a Horrible Accident, and the Urgent Need to Understand the Laws of Space), stain (There are years that ask questions and years that answer. - Zora Neale Hurston) stickers (sloths can hold their breath underwater for up to 40 minutes); chiaroscuro, sculpture
Word Count: 940
Rating: teen
Warnings: Violence, murder.
Summary: Tanhua finds a home, for a while.
Note: Completed Iridium! 🙌
*
There may be no place under Heaven where a monster like myself belongs.
I did not know that on my second, third, or fourth night of being this creature of the other side of life, and as months passed on, I gave up looking for certainty and settled for a place to hide.
I ran into the woods, as I have written before; and I kept running until I had put a small nation's worth of forest between myself and humanity. Then I walked and wandered, eating what I could catch, and hiding in burrows from the sun, until I found the cave.
It was not a deep cave. It did not dig into the rock, it had no narrow passageways or distant echoes of dripping water, as some other caves I have known. It was a place where the bone of the world had cracked and fallen back upon itself, solidified into its shape by questing tree roots and tight-packed earth. It was not very different from a stoat burrow, but it was the perfect size for a little human-shaped monster.
The cave stood on a hill above a small spring lake, in which I washed off the dirt of my travels, and then stayed floating and exploring. I noticed frogs hopping on the slippery shore rocks, staring at me with their bulbous wet eyes, and I found their progeny in a little pool under the shade of low-hanging birch branches. I watched the tadpoles wiggle around, and missed the sun and my childhood so badly that it felt like a wound cut right through my abdomen.
I settled into my cave quickly. At first I only put up heavy slates of rock at the entrance, which I could lift easily now with my new-found strength, and added thick piles of pine branches to inoculate my home from sunlight. I slept and slept; I even slept in nighttime, until I woke up at another sunset so hungry for violence that my eyes ached. Then I would go out and hunt whatever I could find, drain its blood and glut myself, leaving the meat for the other animals of the forest.
My rest was delicious, even when winter came, and I would wake up with ice crusted on my chin and my hair in matted icicles. Though the cold did not really hurt me, I did not like being so stiff, so I began to make fires. It was not too difficult, once I had properly dried some collected wood, but I only did it whenever the ice and snow became truly bothersome. The fire made me restless. Some instinct in the back of my head was crying out: fire means danger.
It was not wrong, though I had nothing but instinct to go on, back then. I was careful to dump enough snow on the fire when it was time to put it out, and make sure not a single ember escaped.
I soon found work to occupy myself. I had started my fires by striking stones and by rubbing wood on wood, but now I made myself tools as well. I reinforced my home against the heavy snow that caved in my pine-door at one point and nearly burned me in the sun. I chipped at the walls of my home to make more space, or make beautiful images on the walls. When summer came, I found plants and mixed paints, and made a frame to clean animal skins on, to make cloaks and shirts to cover up my nakedness. It was not a bad life, out there in the dark wood.
It was not bad at all.
I had lived in the cave for several years before I first saw men out in my woods. I hid in the trees and listened to them talk about a fire seen here up on the hill, about a monster who attacked at night and left animals dead but not eaten. In my panic, I wanted to jump at their backs and tear them all apart, but I held back. They had steel weapons on them, and they were all bigger than myself, and there were three of them. Could I really fight them?
Though I was frightened, I could not stand the thought of them taking my home from me, so I followed them silently. When one fell behind, I took him down in one bite on the neck; he let out barely a gasp before he was gurgling and dying on the ground. I dragged the body to the water's egde and dived in, waiting there under the mirror of the lake's black surface for the other two to come looking for him. I drowned the second man; the third put a knife in me, but I got him under my teeth in the end.
I did not know what to do with the bodies. They presented a problem I had no answer to. If the hunters had come here looking for me because they had found foxes and deer killed but not eaten, how much more curious would others be about these human deaths? I put my head in my hands and wept bloody tears. Was I never to know any peace?
It does not do to gather wool forever, however, especially when the sun is lurking just behind the horizon. I washed my face and hands and returned to my cave, and the next night I set about making traps, but work as I might, I knew that my beautiful home, and the innocence of my youth, was bound to come to an end, and soon.
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