Blackwater Islands CHIM

06.04.23
0300

the prophet roused to the drum of rain against the stone roof of her den, dancing shadows on the walls, and the taste of her own suffering.

it was time.

almalexia rose, and with swift steps came to her altar. she settled again.

the skyrock gleamed through the darkness.

@Ingram's face in her mind's eye;

betrayal.

with a shudder and a painful gritting of teeth, the prophet bore her first child. ruddy, small, dead. she laid the unmoving form at the base of her altar. the scream rose in her throat but dissolved into silence as it hit the air.

blood, blood, and now her second: stormy and stained by her sire's betrayal, but this child lived.

@Anathema.

birth order has been randomized, kiddos will be tagged in as they're born <33!

The beginning of everything was not a memory Anathema would carry for any length of time. She came into existence as fragile and inconsequential to the world as any other newborn, and as wholly unprepared for the life that awaited her.

It was the sound of water she knew first, not through her ears which were still sealed but through the vibrations of the rain and the sea and the waterfall cascading over the den entrance. This sound would follow her for the rest of her life. Anathema crept closer to her mother's warmth, when she had been cleaned and settled, and in her first moments she simply existed. She did not sleep, nor did she move. She only took in the feeling of the water all around her.

for a time the prophet lingered in some between-space, where the whispers and shrieks of spirits dominated even the sound of pouring rain. she closed her eyes, and behind them, a shadow rose.

her second living child slid into the world dark and perfect. untainted.

a @Saint among druids.

there is nothingness.

or rather, what feels like nothingness.

existence and their awareness of it comes in slow waves. the first touch of the air across their wet fur. a violent shiver.

the brush of their mother’s tongue.

warmth.

the vibration of their cry as it tears itself free.

i am here. i am alive. it seems to say.

the warmth that rapidly envelops them as they are guided to their mother’s side and latch on beside the small body against their’s.

a sibling.

the sweet warm taste of mothersmilk as it fills their belly.

and then there is the oilslick nothingness of dreams as they drift off to sleep.

the sky stormed overhead, and the moon peered out from it all, a great pale eye widened upon the happenings below.

she was not done. not yet.

the spirits pressed in all around her and she leaned into them now, drawing on their strength where her own was beginning to fail. and her third living child was born, second daughter. this time the prophet did not see the stain of treacherous blood, but nonetheless felt some unholy rippling from the darkling newborn who would be known as @Accipitra.

two things happened the moment acciptra entered this world: her little body made its entrance as a veil of stormcloud lifted, presenting a gravid moon which bathed the earth in dimglow. and two, a moment's silence eclipsed the din of the storm, ushering the dawn of a new age acciptra would come to witness.

she fell from warmth to something rudely cold, and clawed about with spiderling legs which failed to hoist her. in that glitterless light she resembled something other -- some earlier lifeform from a taxon long forgotten.

poorly positioned there along the den floor, acciptra nursed along the changeling's hind limbs. while her firstborn sibling drank in the darkling world of water, and her brother slept deep, acciptra's body squirmed against them in the shuffling form of a malcontent ouroboros.

three druids — three, and now there would be a fourth, one last great surging of blood and clutching pain.

she leaned against the cold stone of her altar, eyes rolling back. once more, and it would be finished. but the end of it all did not come easily nor kindly.

she writhed and she raged. she snapped her teeth and cried out to nothing and no one. in the depths of her struggle she renounced herself, her faith, her god if only to bring an end.

and at last, with the breaking of dawn, the @Hierophant was born in stark shades of night and day.

the veil between this world and the next became thinner as the night drew longer; as the fifth pulled his first breath the storm had calmed and the sun had begun to rise. 

there was much life ahead of him but for now, all he could do was suckle and sleep.

at last she turned hollow eyes on the four who still drew breath; four living tributes to the holiness of this land, its purpose. druids, all. they would bear the name melonii in honor of the wispmother, who was mother even to these children, for the prophet herself could never be such.

she gazed upon them and felt nothing.

you will address me as the listener.