Chapter Text
Sentience, when it comes, comes suddenly.
It is less the gentle waking from a pleasant dream and far more akin to being held under cold water and taking a painful, choking breath - the snapping of something, the sensation of earth giving way underfoot before a sudden fall.
He wakes to a dawning, painful realization that he is anywhere but home - there is no warm sunlight, no faint smell of musty leaves, no gentle clattering of armored soldiers on the footpaths overhead.
Instead, he is drowning. Every sense - every inch of his skin - is drowning in blood. There is neither escape from the cloying smell of it nor the hot, tacky crawl of it, the pervasive omnipresence of it - it fills his lungs as he gasps, burning from the inside out, and it is only then that he wakes enough to be aware of the excruciating pain that comes with the panic. Distant burning escalates into sharp, pointed agony, a wrenching of flesh and contortion of limbs he cannot bring himself to wholly control.
And he is not alone.
This is the worst part of it, Miquella thinks, as his skin crawls with tacky, invisible fingerprints, as something twists around, inside, throughout his very being, as panic and revulsion rise, as he desperately seeks some cessation for the sensation, the claustrophobic agony of it all, the cold feeling that he has horribly miscalculated at some stage to end up in this place, where he is ripped apart from every inch of his being, as this thing curls around, inside, along his flesh-
-he cannot even bear to move his jaw enough to sob, to choke, to scream.
The Formless Mother, he knows - by the smell of her, the reeking of her proxy who relishes in this baseless defilement, the reverence with which he curls around Miquella’s throat, each lock of his hair, tracing each pound of flesh like a relic instead of his body. She spills from each revolting caress of her woeful progeny, he can feel her burning her way into his limbs, rearranging him like a butcher pulls viscera from a carcass, enveloping him like a second skin, warping his great work into the cradle of her own, a-
-he needs to be anywhere but here. It is all he can do to beg, blind and voiceless, for the sweet death of sleep. Unconsciousness would be a mercy, since he cannot, as he wishes, flay his skin from his body, peel the unwanted, tainted organ from the rest of the ruined meat, shed himself like their blasphemous brother, flee to death denied them all. But there are no gods to answer the prayers of demigods, and all that remains at his disposal is to surrender himself to mere disembodiment.
It is impossible to fully divorce himself from his skin, his being, to numb himself to the heat of it, deafen himself to the nauseating murmur, the prayers whispered into the crook of his neck. If he was not already opposed to the notion of worship, this alone would be enough to purge the desire from the very essence of his being.
What he has left, Miquella dimly notes, is only one thing.
Resolve to leave, one way or another. He will do whatever he has to, provided it will get him out of this wretched, agonizing place.
*
Time slows to a ceaseless crawl, a nonexistent, agonizing nothingness.
He knows that time has passed nonetheless, however, because he has constructed a plan.
With as much distance as he can bear, he has permitted himself a scarce few thoughts about his present situation. The first of these thoughts is this: he can feel the corruption taking root in his flesh, worming its way into each muscle, each organ, each cavity, like a parasitic plant taking root in a tree bed. The sensation worsens each time his brother reverently coats him in his viscera, defiling the second skin of his cocoon in pursuit of a bloody bedchamber.
The forceful reshaping of his flesh, he finds, draws forth a seed of violent, poisonous anger. A piece of him is able to identify that as a distinct corruption in and of itself. This is not their handiwork but a distant, tenuous impulse. A longing, perhaps for violence irrespective of cost, that someone would burst forth into this wretched place and ruin the both of them, tear it all apart, shatter the broken remains of the world and everything in it.
It’s changing him.
Dimly, he notes, there is a new-burgeoning hatred somewhere in the far recesses of his mind directed at the broken remnants of their other mother. That he can still think, plan, claw at the vague and hopeless notion of freedom in spite of such ruination, and that the Eternal snapped over something so trivial as a single death... the thought makes him long to drive his nails into her chest and rip divinity from her very core, crush it and throw everything in her that was a person and not a concept to the wind.
This is not a good change, Miquella knows. And so, he has arrived at his solution.
Deep within the core of his flesh, staving off the repulsive becoming that they seem eager to draw from the meat he seeks no connection to, is a single needle, no larger than a finger. He is uncertain why the Lord of Blood did not remove it, buried as it was in the core of himself, when he was butchered, torn from the Haligtree. He cannot bear to ascribe a rationale to it - plenty come to mind and he would rather not consider a single one of them.
It was not for his own sake when he first pierced his heart - he has spent a lifetime learning to tiptoe around the worst of dear Malenia’s rot. His intention, rather, was to mitigate the warping of his great work at his own hands - he could not risk the corruption of the Haligtree at the hands of his own cold poison.
His plan is this, Miquella thinks, faintly. He will follow in the footsteps of his older siblings, the ones he mourned and loved. He will be the unlucky third of the three to rend himself - be rent - from corrupted flesh, to disconnect his spirit from the rancid remains of his body, in pursuit of yet another wretched approximation of the death that Marika the Cursed sowed in every single fucking one of them.
Miquella knows he is undying. He knows this - not mere poison - is his curse: the stillborn death of possibility, ungrowing, unfading. But Destined Death is long locked away, surely, or he’d have given up the ghost somehow long ago, somewhere after waking up in this ceaseless, rancid nightmare. All manner of death washes up somewhere. He’ll become a shade if he must, faded and forgotten.
Anything other than this, he thinks, soul keening as he is dragged once more under the undertow .
It takes all that remains of his ruined strength to twitch, summon forth that single, broken movement, but it is enough.
The needle snaps. Agony and long-dulled panic fade away as he is flooded with cold numbness, and then there is nothing at all.
*