Pen Dips 3/31
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3) Prompt: your character is now a vengeful wraith.
It took death to show Ourida Asabana how much life had been a burden. All that breathing and caring, that adornment and mating and -- done now. Other Awakened busied themselves with trying to duplicate their mortal lives, but what a waste. What a waste of potential, of freed time, freed everything.
She scratched words into her leathery skin with the dark talons her fingernails had become. Words, names. Places. Villages that had not worshiped Palawa Joko as they should have done. Her uncle who ‘liberated’ her from her contentment at the Necropolis. The ‘good’ people who helped her uncle sweep her away from study and purpose. The outlanders who swarmed Elona for treasure and knowledge and disruption.
Palawa Joko was not gone. Gathering his strength, yes. Plotting, strategizing. All of history since his first rise showed his brilliance. He would come again when he was least expected, and Ourida would sink gratefully back into service with the ease of sliding into a warm bath. Hail Palawa Joko. Hail the Endless King.
The first village that had fed her after her uncle’s kidnapping -- they were weak already after famine and attack and all the other miseries the outlanders had brought to what had been a sovereign land. Others of her kind moved among the living humans. None bore the sigils of their masters and princes -- no, they wore the bright colors of their clans, or simple village attire. An Awakened elder walked beside a woman who held a babe. They laughed together. Ourida would have choked back bile, had she still known how.
A whispered word, and minions stretched bony appendages up through the sand and dragged themselves to perch by her bare, blackened feet. A bilious green miasma shot through with orange and grey seeped from her pores, her mouth, her sunken eyes. A sentry saw and cried an alert just before one of her minions rolled forward in a lopsided, limbless tangle to drag him down into the sand.
“Teach them,” she whispered to the chunks of animate flesh surrounding her. They surged forward. She followed after drawing her greatsword from its harness at her back. This was the lesson: power was better than life. Hail Palawa Joko. Hail the Endless King.
