Blind. The seam of its eyelids had long since scarred over. A sloppy, jagged looking seam where skin met skin and now joined to itself below center of its closed eye. The stitching remained though. Woven with metal and the threads from Spanish moss, its eyes had been stitched long ago.
It remembered also, the sound of its own teeth while they were being reshaped. The scraping, gritty, filing. Its tongue lolling to and fro in an involuntary response. Snagging on its teeth. Sticky blood and saliva running down its jowls.
It took ages for its feet to scar. For so long they blackened with rot as it lay helpless enduring the procedures. Bone fusing with bone. The stench. It could smell the bodies. They were being stripped of their flesh. Their bones were being shoveled into the cauldrons. It could smell the cauldrons. It could hear the shoveling. All the time. The bones knocked against each other while they were lifted from the earthen floor, dumped into the cauldrons and mixed together in the resevoir of juices.
But not the skulls. The skulls lined the wall and were filled with the broth from the cauldron. Their mouths were stuffed with the skin of their own bodies. Each time it was about to fade away into death, it was fed from those skulls. The putrid life-giving broth poured down its throat. It could taste sin, and sorrow. It could taste the dismal despair of hundreds. Coughing and sputtering, it rallied back just above the brink of death. The stone sledgehammer driving the bone composite into it's flesh. Its own bones smashing to pieces from the impact. Feeling the pool of its own blood as it lay there.
Full moons waxed and waned. Over and over....over and over. It didn't remember the pain specifically. And it didn't remember the sorrow. It only remembered the anger. It remembered the anger and its own screaming. Those screams became its world. Those screams were all it had for a very long time.
Once it had been so innocent. It had been so full of life and was a gentle, playful creature. It lived in the forest and grazed in the meadow. Its eyes. So clear and bright. Brilliant blue and penetrating they surveyed the world with care and clarity. Its coat and mane shone brightly in the warmth of the sun. It's gentle eyes regarded the world with kindness. Regal and glorious it beamed with benevolence. Its tail was lush. Its thick black coat sparkled with the majesty of midnight on a Summer's equinox.
The sparkle was gone now. Its hair was matted. Its tail stripped of its glory and its mane hung like a shroud upon a coffin. Its wounds did not permanently close with time and age, but would systematically ooze and clot. The stench and blackened drippings left smears upon everything they touched.
Its loomed up out of the rock, an imposing and foreboding figure perching on the cliff overlooking the mist in the valley below with its sense of smell and its far reaching mind. Its embedded talons dug in the Earth and left marks in the rock. It surveyed the land. It snorted the damp air through its mighty nostrils and cocked its ears to the east. Its eyes sewn shut so long ago, but its mind could see. So clearly.
Muscles were taught, almost bursting through the mats of hair. They did not twitch in anticipation. Emotional depth had been depleted and then destroyed outright. Space for anything that could be considered frivolous such as anticipation had been left to die long ago. Anticipation breeds wonder. Wonder knows hope, empathy, beauty, and chance. Wonder had no place here.
Its enormous black feathered wings unfolded and spread wide in a sudden show of intent. They lacked shine and were not the ethereal wings of an angel. They were demon's wings. Thick and dark, they were the wings in a child's nightmare, the mere sight of them sending the world's bravest creatures to bolt and cower beneath shadows. To be brushed by them as the creature moved passed you would leave you clutching your throat and gasping for breath. Its equine form leapt from the rock and the squeal of terror from a thousand animals rose up and hung in the air, a deafening siren of fear and alarm.
It flew.
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