Fatestitcher

Content Warning

Please note that this short story contains references to:

Implied off page sexual violence/rape, gore, blood, murder, mental health conditions, physical violence, abuse, fantasy theology, and religious trauma.

Fatestitcher

“You must kill her.”

It crumbled before him, as if it were an intricate play orchestrated by the universe to remind him how small he was again. He was suddenly sent back to a memory—a memory of being small and obsolete, where men wished to see him break.

After all, why would they wish to see him thrive, for he stood for everything they hated? Perhaps that was why she was so alluring when they'd met. The red that covered her from her hair to her sharpened nails, the scent of death she carried around every corner as she walked. It reminded him of them, not his oppressors, but his liberator. It reminded him of a time when he stood in a room, surrounded by men, and listened to the incessant dripping of their blood as it pooled on the floor.

Just a touch, a taste, is all they wanted. Something to remind him of his place, and that his reality of birth was damning. He wasn't allowed to be anything but the small, meek, little thing the world wanted him to be. That they swore he was born to be. The rest of the memory was blurred, unwelcome, for it felt like briars dragging over his skin and shredding it apart. He didn't need to see it to feel it, to know what had happened before it all came to an abrupt end. Then he was there, nothing but flesh and bone and tears streaming down his face, for everything else had been stripped from him.

Taken from him in that vile play of the universe. The Old Gods. What a mockery they were if they could sit idly by and watch such a thing happen to one not even nineteen. Oh, how those fools all worshipped them. The very fools whose innards were scattered around, shredded apart, like they'd been tossed into some vile cyclone that had burst from the heavens. Killian had always tried to be a good boy, or rather a good girl then. That's what they wanted him to be after all. A good little thing they could ravage, demean, and dominate just as they had his mother and his sisters.

He was not his mother or his sisters. He was not one to follow cruel beings of the divine simply because it was customary. He was not one to fit into the little boxes they checked and tried to shove down your throat like moldy bread and cheese.

Maybe that's why he was saved from that torment.

His retribution had not come by the hand of an Old God sent from the Divine Plane, but from a Primal born of chaos and calamity. What a strange thing it had been standing with his body bare and nothing but red surrounding him. Their voice had been intoxicating, just like hers was. They had spoken sweet nothings, not the usual brutality bathed in condemnation but harsh truth coated in kindness. They, the being as old as the dark that the stars lived within, had offered him justice and acknowledgement. Not for the little brat they wanted him to be, but for the man he'd been born to be.

They had brought him to her, so it was only fitting that they were the one to ask him for her end.

Killian let his eyes wander from the vacant expanse of sky he'd been studying in thought and down to the dirty stone floor. He was no longer that tiny, powerless creature he'd once been. He was taller, stronger, wiser, viler. He reached up a hand to rub over his eyes and lingered on the scars below their sockets. The scars from where men tried to pluck his eyeballs from his head with fire and dagger. Once, he'd wanted to hide them, for he was not a human but a shifter: a shape changer that could alter his appearance at whim. Now, he did not hide them, for they were a reminder of the being of infinite possibility he'd pledged his life to when his foundation crumbled and was rebuilt by his own hand.

"Are you certain I must kill her?" he asked, voice gravely and teetering into the abyss of androgyny.

Her. Elaina. That beautiful Blood Mage that smelled of rot and death. The superb specimen of a woman who bathed in blood and teased him relentlessly with her fingertips. The woman he'd been led to and now was being told he must destroy.

"She has been using me. Are you alright with that?"

"Of course not. My love for you is beyond the flesh, no matter how immortal it may be," Killian answered the voice that echoed in his bedchamber, not daring to turn to search for the being he knew was not there. His dark eyes turned to his hands, where his fingertips brushed against one another. His skin was a pale grey, faded like overused leather that had been sunbleached and left to rot in a bog. His nailbeds were dirty, stained with a faint copper as if he'd been digging through dirt, blood, and bone his whole life.

"Why did you lead me to her, then?" he asked finally.

"You were to be the end of her story, just as I was the end of theirs."

Ah, now he could see. Now he understood. Time, place, and existence were simply a twisted, chaotic string of events stitched together and called fate. It was his fate to meet her, adore her, and give her the most beautiful end he could. She would be made into a masterpiece he could treasure long after she was gone—what a lovely, tragic existence.

Killian reached for a piece of twine from his belt and used it to pull his stringy white hair up. It was limp, thin, and hung around his shoulders like a wet mop. It obscured his vision, and he would need all the help he could get to end her. He wished to see all of it without worrying over blind spots. Then, he grasped the heavy iron mace near the wall, pausing only to brush a bit of dust off the twisted face of a ram that made its head. He had not gone to war in a while. His shoulders tensed, and his main hand quickly swung the weapon the length of his arm. It whistled, sending the air into a frenzy and charging static along his spine.

He could hear a skull cracking, breaking, from a memory.

"So be it," he muttered, hoisting the weapon over his shoulder and trudging for the rotting door that led to the hall.

He would be the end of a love, if only to birth a new one.