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eerieindianaSo, I signed up for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spook_me challenge this year, and chose shapeshifter as my creature. The two prompt pieces of artwork I received are below:
http://s879.photobucket.com/user/spook_me/media/Spook%20Me%202015/Lifebringer_1120311_zpsrgr3qyxi.jpg.html
http://s879.photobucket.com/user/spook_me/media/Spook%20Me%202015/3044af0a034fce24d6298182dacd9fe1_zpskmna4xgo.jpg.html
Unfortunately, I didn't come up with anything for the second picture, but this is what I managed for the first one:
Lifebringer, they call her, the men and women who climb her mountain to stand, barefoot and bleeding, outside her cave. They come to ask for a bountiful harvest, a healthy pregnancy, a respite from the blight that is devouring the fields of neighbouring townships. When a cow fails to produce milk or the rain does not fall, they gather to plead for her intercession on their behalf, bringing calves wearing wreathes and crowns of corn and barley and kale to sacrifice in her honour.
She could have told them then that a famine or drought is hardly helped by cremating your scrawny livestock and meagre harvest on a rocky mountainside, but when she steps from the shadows into the sunlight, they scream in terror and prostrate themselves before her, or flee in panic, stumbling down the narrow goat-path back to the safety of their homes. In their rush to get away, many trip and fall and are killed, and eventually she gets tired of the blood and drama, and does not come to them at all.
They call her the Lifebringer, Yearwalker, Changer of Seasons, so that is the role she takes on for them. In truth, she is no more or less than what she has always been, what she was long before the little hairless apes developed tools and speech and fire, and thought to bargain with their betters. Indeed, though they credit her with the turning of the world, she could change herself with far less ease than they themselves change, because they can grown and age and die, and she can do none of these things, being immortal and therefore untouched by the world that moves around her.
When the Harvest Moon rises above Eerie, she sits at the entrance to her cave and listens for the howls, and the screams. By the time the fat white moon has reached it's zenith, there will be hot blood spilled somewhere on Wolf Mountain, and in the pale pre-dawn hours, she will find the patch of stained earth and lie upon it, her lilac-grey fur turning reddish-brown and her belly growing warm and round as she soaks up the spilt life of the sacrifice.
The red patches will seep and spread across her coat, blossoming like bloody flowers across her body, and when they are full and ripe, crimson-stomached birds will tear jagged holes in her skin, shattering the red blooms like eggshells, and be born into the world from her ravaged flesh.
Sometimes, when her children have burst into full, waking life, she will fly with them for a little while. She lands in the human gardens and nibbles at the seed they leave out for her bloody-breasted offspring. Sometimes she walks the paths men travel, and she sees her children's image in greeting cards offered for sale far too early in the year, and wonders why they make such efforts to placate her into bringing the growing times back, only for them to hurry on the long winter nights themselves.
When she walks among the humans, it pleases her to touch her glowing, luminous horn to the people she sees in the streets. She can heal an old sorrow, or quicken a child to life in the womb, or halt an encroaching illness in its tracks. Trees already bare and skeletal for the coming cold sprout new leaves that crisp and age and give one final burst of red and gold as she passes by on her small black feet, and the low autumn sun is golden and warm for the time of year.
She wonders what they see when she steps alongside them, these descendants of the villagers who wept and threw themselves from rocky outcrops when she tried to speak with them a hundred years ago. In pools of rainwater, or the metallic body of a passing car, she is the same as she remembers; the face not so very different from their own faces, though her eyes are larger and set further apart, the long sweep of her foxlike tail, her white wings folded tidily along her smooth back as she moves with light steps through their busy human world.
Now, it is only a scant handful of children who notice her presence, who stare and point and whisper in hushed awe to their parents, and who wake crying in the night at the memory of an ancient mystery that they cannot put into words, and can never solve.
She is what she has always been, but the humans change with the passing of the years, and so they change her shape to suit their own needs, their secret fears and their desperate, burning desires. She walks through eternity, but when she matches her pace to theirs, she can feel the passing of time on her skin, strange and wonderful and impossible to experience without their help, and she thinks, I should make a sacrifice to them in thanks for this gift, and I would do it, were I not the very last of my kind.
spook_me challenge this year, and chose shapeshifter as my creature. The two prompt pieces of artwork I received are below:http://s879.photobucket.com/user/spook_me/media/Spook%20Me%202015/Lifebringer_1120311_zpsrgr3qyxi.jpg.html
http://s879.photobucket.com/user/spook_me/media/Spook%20Me%202015/3044af0a034fce24d6298182dacd9fe1_zpskmna4xgo.jpg.html
Unfortunately, I didn't come up with anything for the second picture, but this is what I managed for the first one:
Lifebringer, they call her, the men and women who climb her mountain to stand, barefoot and bleeding, outside her cave. They come to ask for a bountiful harvest, a healthy pregnancy, a respite from the blight that is devouring the fields of neighbouring townships. When a cow fails to produce milk or the rain does not fall, they gather to plead for her intercession on their behalf, bringing calves wearing wreathes and crowns of corn and barley and kale to sacrifice in her honour.
She could have told them then that a famine or drought is hardly helped by cremating your scrawny livestock and meagre harvest on a rocky mountainside, but when she steps from the shadows into the sunlight, they scream in terror and prostrate themselves before her, or flee in panic, stumbling down the narrow goat-path back to the safety of their homes. In their rush to get away, many trip and fall and are killed, and eventually she gets tired of the blood and drama, and does not come to them at all.
They call her the Lifebringer, Yearwalker, Changer of Seasons, so that is the role she takes on for them. In truth, she is no more or less than what she has always been, what she was long before the little hairless apes developed tools and speech and fire, and thought to bargain with their betters. Indeed, though they credit her with the turning of the world, she could change herself with far less ease than they themselves change, because they can grown and age and die, and she can do none of these things, being immortal and therefore untouched by the world that moves around her.
When the Harvest Moon rises above Eerie, she sits at the entrance to her cave and listens for the howls, and the screams. By the time the fat white moon has reached it's zenith, there will be hot blood spilled somewhere on Wolf Mountain, and in the pale pre-dawn hours, she will find the patch of stained earth and lie upon it, her lilac-grey fur turning reddish-brown and her belly growing warm and round as she soaks up the spilt life of the sacrifice.
The red patches will seep and spread across her coat, blossoming like bloody flowers across her body, and when they are full and ripe, crimson-stomached birds will tear jagged holes in her skin, shattering the red blooms like eggshells, and be born into the world from her ravaged flesh.
Sometimes, when her children have burst into full, waking life, she will fly with them for a little while. She lands in the human gardens and nibbles at the seed they leave out for her bloody-breasted offspring. Sometimes she walks the paths men travel, and she sees her children's image in greeting cards offered for sale far too early in the year, and wonders why they make such efforts to placate her into bringing the growing times back, only for them to hurry on the long winter nights themselves.
When she walks among the humans, it pleases her to touch her glowing, luminous horn to the people she sees in the streets. She can heal an old sorrow, or quicken a child to life in the womb, or halt an encroaching illness in its tracks. Trees already bare and skeletal for the coming cold sprout new leaves that crisp and age and give one final burst of red and gold as she passes by on her small black feet, and the low autumn sun is golden and warm for the time of year.
She wonders what they see when she steps alongside them, these descendants of the villagers who wept and threw themselves from rocky outcrops when she tried to speak with them a hundred years ago. In pools of rainwater, or the metallic body of a passing car, she is the same as she remembers; the face not so very different from their own faces, though her eyes are larger and set further apart, the long sweep of her foxlike tail, her white wings folded tidily along her smooth back as she moves with light steps through their busy human world.
Now, it is only a scant handful of children who notice her presence, who stare and point and whisper in hushed awe to their parents, and who wake crying in the night at the memory of an ancient mystery that they cannot put into words, and can never solve.
She is what she has always been, but the humans change with the passing of the years, and so they change her shape to suit their own needs, their secret fears and their desperate, burning desires. She walks through eternity, but when she matches her pace to theirs, she can feel the passing of time on her skin, strange and wonderful and impossible to experience without their help, and she thinks, I should make a sacrifice to them in thanks for this gift, and I would do it, were I not the very last of my kind.
