Bearclaw Valley sickness

maggot-child, the thought echoed, now ready to be more critically observed.

she'd have thought it an effect of the hallucinogenics she was under while giving birth, but the association lasted.
this babe, long where her sisters were wide, of a colour that had never before come out her womb, strongly resembled a larva.
 
it crawled into the thick ruff of her chest, and bernadette adjusted herself stiffly, contact still unwanted and unpleasant.

...were she a sign? the former supplicant of ursus had thought the beargod would show its signs in a shape easier to associate with itself. but it would be quite base to assume such a fervently worshipped deity only had power over things like it. how many gifts were left upon its altars, and how many turned rotten and fly-infested? surely, its influence extended over the rot-eating things.

yes, the girl was worth her name. she was the way in which the god - so misunderstood by the savages which simplified it - wished to communicate with the dutiful scholar.

bernadette's muzzle bent down to look at the pale, wriggling thing looking as if wishing to burrow within her meat.

"parousia." she breathed again, in her shadowed, black eyes a shine reserved for things once believed worthless, only to be proven of use.