🎁 : LOOK TO WINDWARD / SLEEP TOKEN @bells-of-black-sunday / tarhos — spotify wrapped — accepting!
He awoke in his own blood. A slick, coagulating mess, sticky on his flesh, matted to his hair, leeching from the open wounds freckling his body. A starless sky greeted him above. A breeze cold on his exposed face.
She had been merciless. A cruel mistress beating Her once loyal dog back into submission. He remembered agony. Recalled the way flesh had been pulled from the meat of him as if he were nothing but a hunk of lamb on the butcher table. Several blinks and the remnants of the memories were pushed aside. Shoved into far corners of his mind where they'd haunt him, shadows always at the edges of his vision.
It took hours for him to set himself upright, to put on a shroud, draped to obscure any evidence of Her cruelties. Longer to don a mask. He stared at that warped visage, bone-white and ghastly, long enough that he swore it was mocking him. Long enough that a well of revulsion pulsed in his sternum. With it, an intense desire to rip that face to shreds.
He didn't. Danny yanked it over his face, smearing streaks of his own blood on the vinyl.
Ghostface's instinct was to rise, to float to a space he felt a semblance of comfort normalcy: the Borgo and its memory of massacre. As he trudged, past wagons and hay bales and old fences, he tried in vain to remember what he could not. Parts of his past he swore he could recall yesterday, now gone, vanished. Stolen. It made his gut roil.
He found Tarhos in one of the old buildings. Ghostface stilled in the entrance, slumped against the door frame for support. At his sides, his sleeves were notably slack.
"Everything looks the same," he wheezed. There was no voice modulator pressed to his neck. No alteration of his voice. Raw, real Danny exposed in such a simple way.
"I. . .have forgotten. I—" he spluttered a wet cough. Blood streamed down the mask's chin, "—used to know myself."
