~ a short story
Naked in bed, I lay staring. At it.
Every night was like this. For minutes, sometimes hours, I drank in the magnificence. “Bloodghast” was the name of the piece. A painting of a ghostly, vampiric, daemonic creature; a beautiful friend. I’d purchased, framed and mounted it in the center stage of my bedroom. It loomed over my bed, watching over me with its bloody maw wide, its hands wisping, fangs dripping and eyes boring with a hunger for life’s essence in others.
Tonight, my eyes mirrored its own. Red tears flowed from my ducts, streaming onto my body and my sheets, staining skin and soaking covers. I was not crying. At least, not consciously. The tears sourced from my soul. I soon found that I could not blink; delightfully, I found myself unable to turn away from my precious ghast.
For the first time, the tables were turned — it was drinking me.
They. Beezavisk and his many companions had chosen me. These tears eventually streamed from every part of me. Every duct and gland and orifice that I housed upon my corporeal form flowed my inside to the outside. My bed became red with my former life.
When my friends found me, I was smiling. I’d worked up to it while rigor mortis set in. Eyes wide with pained anticipation, still staring at my lovely mark on the wall. When the doctors examined my corpse and the scene, they discovered that every single drop of my blood had been spilled onto the bed, drained down from there onto the wood to drip on my neighbors a floor below. My body was a husk.
But that had always been true. Now that I am free of that wretched, limited life, my soul sings and weeps with the same bloody fervor as the ghasts, my sires, my fellow children of the night.
We will begin to fly tonight, together forever as a part of Beez’s pack, drinking whomever we please. ~
