#arbywrites

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What a way to wake in the night: warmth, comfort, love… home. Rham’bek could hear his children snoring peacefully in the dark, and Metoa was curled against him. Shatterspear Vale was at peace, but maybe it was a little too quiet in the hut. The old sneak grinned to himself as he felt his wife climb atop him, but when he slid inside her the sound was all wrong, a man’s sigh, a man’s bulk bearing down on him. Startled into wakefulness, he nearly shoved the other man off of him until he came to his senses and realized it was his Kulikara.

‘No,’ he thought. ‘They’re gone now. Just a dream.’ The familiar hiss of tusk sliding against tusk as Kulikara leaned down to Rham’bek distracted the old man just enough that for a moment he didn’t hear that quiet chuckling just dripping with malice. Didn’t feel the wet spatters against his skin until they were joined by small chunks of some horrible substance. He opened his eyes, and the thing that was riding him like a cheap whore may have been wearing his husband’s body, but it wasn’t Kulikara, not really. Skin peeled and flesh sloughed off with each movement, and when he opened that too-wide mouth to grin, the high-pitched cackling came out sounding like a raging wildfire, like the screams of women and children.