#negtive

Day 6 Negative/Relic @daily-writing-challenge Inked on the right side of neck and up behind his right ear - The Messenger

He didn’t wear the mark for beauty. No one asked about it twice.

Etched like a curse into the right side of Vaelsnipe’s neck, the baying crow perched atop the elven skull was not stylized, nor softened by artistry. Its wings weren’t open in grace, they were jagged, half-spread in a tension that never resolved. Inked in pitch black, it carved a harsh contrast against the pale skin there, as though the flesh itself had refused to accept it. And maybe it had.

But the ink stayed. Because it was not just ink. It was a relic not of pride, not of heroism. But of ruin.

He had taken it in the ruins of Quel’Thalas, years after the screams had faded. When the forest had stopped burning and started growing strange again. When the stones of Silvermoon had long since cooled. He returned not out of hope. Hope was for people who could still cry.

He had gone to walk the bones of memory.

No weapons. No contracts. No mask. Just Vael and whatever was left of him. He’d wandered until the paths ended and the trees bent wrong, and in that silence he found it, a crow, pitch and terrible, tearing at the ribcage of a ranger too far gone to recognize. A ranger he might have once saluted. Might have once loved.

The bird shrieked when it saw him just once. And in that sound was the truth:

They are gone. You are what remains.

Something cracked open in him, not like fire, not like fury. But like rot. Like truth too long buried coming to the surface with its bones still wet. The crow kept eating, and Vael stood watching, and in the ruin of that moment, something in him died properly for the first time since the fall.

He had always known the crow as a harbinger of death but that day it became more. A scavenger, yes. A thing that fed on what the world left behind. But it lived. It changed with the wind and wore the wreckage of kingdoms like feathers.

That’s what he marked on his skin. The crow. The skull. His own skull, stylized and hollow-eyed, pressed beneath the bird’s claw.

The man he’d once been, a protector, a noble, a son, was buried in that dirt. The mark was the tombstone. And he carried it not out of sentiment, but defiance.

He had not risen from those ruins as something heroic. He had risen as a relic, the walking dead of a dead homeland, preserved by bitterness and breath alone.

He wore the tattoo on his neck so no one would forget. So he wouldn’t. So every mirror, every brush of a hand against his throat, reminded him of what had been taken. What had been wasted.

And what still hunted in him. He was not a phoenix. There had been no fire. No rebirth. He was the crow. The last sound in a forest of the dead. The thing that remained when all else had moved on.

And if the ink bled a little deeper every time someone he loved looked away first... well.

"I hate Vanessa. Not because I have the theory that’s she’s Vanny I actually think they are two separate people, but she’s just so rude to Freddy anytime she’s on screen and is a total jerk. I could literally go on for a solid half hour talking about how I hate her." -an anonymous that is most definitely not fond of the white girl