The Ladies of Horror
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A World Beneath the Amber Sky
by Christina Sng

I awoke to find my city overcast in amber, thick clouds covering the sky like an angry blanket flung atop an unwanted snow globe.

Climate change, I heard the whispers of the cowl-shrouded masses as they trudged the roads with masks to shield their faces from the soot swirling in the air.

I smiled for the first time in millennia. This time, we would succeed. This time we would rule.

Ravenous, I seized the nearest person beside me, tore off its cowl and drank deeply.

To my fury, there was no blood. It whipped its face up to meet mine, grinning as it spoke in the dulcet tones of my twin.

“You are too slow, dear sibling, slept a century too long. I’ve already taken over the world, enslaved the humans to produce blood for me. It’s my turn to rule now.”

I laughed at the pallid, limp catspaw in my grip.

“You’ve just made the game more interesting. Don’t forget, I’ve just had a hundred years of genetic adaptation over you. Let me show you my new trick.”

The creature’s eyes widened as I devoured its hand, then its arm, and then the other, each bite bringing fresh color to my skin. I saved its eyes for last to send a message.

“I’m coming for you.”

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Christina Sng:

A Collection of Nightmares

Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.
These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.
Dream carefully.
You’ve already made your bed.
The nightmares you have now will not be kind.
And you have no one to blame but yourself.

Available on Amazon!