The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Azeial’s Breath
by Bailey Hunter

Azeial breathed deep, filling her lungs with the sorrows of mankind.

For centuries beyond centuries, millennia beyond millennia, Azeial had inhaled the despair and longing that came with the creation of sentient beings. She had been born of their anguish and took it into herself with each breath. Like the trees that filtered the polluted air, she filtered the blackness of their woes so that light could exist.

She traveled amongst the prayers and unspoken pleas for help, taking in each one. Deaths and losses filled her twisted, withered frame painting her skin in sallow, dusky tones of grey, and burnt orange. Her tears, which fell in endless streams, washed the earth, feeding growth and rebirth.

Azeial moved across the planes where human voices cried out in every tongue, drawing in the endless torment. Such wide spread desperation she had not seen in all her time.

The weight of each breath began to pull her down. Deep into the cool dirt, beneath the concrete and grasses, below the bones, below the fear, below the voices. She grew so weary. Too much sadness, too much loss and pain, too much fear, too much hate, too much sorrow…

The whole world was crying out at once and it was more than she could breathe in.

Azeial lie still and took her final breath, inhaling nothing, exhaling the blackness that filled her until there was no light left and all the earth was dark.

Fiction © Copyright Bailey Hunter
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Bailey Hunter:
Bailey is a publisher with Dark Recesses Press.

Staking Cinderella

Gavin’s got a serious problem. A “praise Jee-sus,” rich-bitch caught him fanging—and banging—his Halloween date. Now she’s playing Holy Vampire Killer, and it’s ticking him off.

Since then, Gavin’s found someone better to occupy his mind and heart. Isolde—in bed, on the couch, in the shower. She has a thing for Disney princesses, but he’s willing to overlook it. Women like her only come around once or twice in five hundred years. He knows.

When Isolde is kidnapped to bait a deathtrap for Gavin, he’s torn between two truths…abandoning Isolde is unthinkable, but rescuing her could mean death for both of them.

DarkRecessesPress.com