[ATM] Awakening;
Title: Awakening Fandom: Original (Against the Moon) Character/s: Ban, Gora Words: 457 Notes: Ban is finally opening up a little about the temple! Huzzah! Word #82.
If she had expected to wake at all, she had not expected to wake this way, dried stickiness tightening her skin. She had not thought a waking possible, after what they did to her, but her flesh still moved, her eyes still saw. So, she had awoken. But she was not alive.
She looked down at her hands and although she perceived that the room was dark, the darkness was no obstacle. Blood was the stickiness dried on her fingers - she had tried to hold her body closed, she remembered, with none of the horror that should have accompanied such a thought. It clotted beneath her nails and in the natural creases of her palm, thick and dark, crumbling away when she rubbed at it. The floor she had lain on was no better than her hands, stained with gore and more brightly coloured than anything else in the temple. She stared at it, not horrified, not entranced, just... noticing.
It would have to be cleaned.
She stood to fetch water, to fetch rags, and felt it then - the strength that was not hers, that was not human. She felt it and wondered, glanced at the likeness of the earth god on the altar, and dismissed it from her mind. There were yet tasks to be completed, and she was not completing them here. She moved on. But as she walked, she listened to the temple, and did not hear its usual rhythm - heard very little at all. And when she stepped outside the main shrine, she understood why.
The bodies of her adjutants were strewn about the hall, limbs askew, garments destroyed. The colour was everywhere, staining the stone, and not a breath stirred the chamber. Her personal attendant was propped almost neatly against the pillar to her left, his eyes blank, now, but his body, the spirit that lingered, bespoke the terror that had come upon him as he died.
She had always hoped better for Gora. She knelt by him, touched the dried stickiness on his cool flesh, and, touching it, understood completely what had befallen their temple.
She closed his eyes and lifted his wrist to her lips, began to lick and suck the blood away. She would give them back to the earth god; she would not scrub their blood away from his stone. She would give her companions back to the earth god, and then she would find the vampire clan they had dismissed as only rumour. Gora's flesh caught in her teeth, his blood cold and still, but no less nourishing in the long run for her kind - her new kind.
She would find them. She would teach them. And if they could not be taught, they would be stopped.