The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Burn Pit Prophet 
by Donna J. W. Munro 

By the time the last flame died, and the coals cooled, I wasn’t myself.

My sun brown skin crackled with black ridges, weeping valleys, and crusted plateaus. My braids had melted away leaving only the wiry strands of metal I’d plaited in before they’d come for us. On the charcoal appendages that once were fingers, metal shadows marked the places where my love had given me gifts and treasures to wear, now melted away but for the brand they left in the process.

I’d walked through the fire pit they’d put us in. Climbed over the charred bodies of the other conquered mothers and children they’d offered their gods as payment for their works. They kept only our land, our animals, our treasures. All else became offering.

The leaders sneered at our ways. Said living as we did, without men leading and without warriors bleeding, meant we were an insane cult. Something so aberrant that we threatened the balance of the world. That our traditions, our songs, our prayers, even our gods had to be scrubbed from the memory of the world.

I stood before their chief, a fat painted demon man who spoke in grunts and shouts, I knew we had done no wrong. Others cried. Begged. Promised. But I saw the madness in the chief’s eyes. I saw the greed in his men at arms, the sneers of disgust when they saw our naked shoulders and knees. We were offensive to their power. We were a plague that they, only they, could wipe from all the earth.

None of the cries or pleas mattered in the face of their insanity.

No empathy can exist in a vacuum of love.

The pit we dug would be our grave. They told us that. Why did the others dig? The fathers and mothers did it so their children might live a little more life. The lovers did it hoping that compliance would allow them to escape. The children did it because the world hadn’t taught them to fear the unhinged beliefs of maniacs. So, they dug.

I prayed. I prayed to the ocean god to wash us away to safety. I beseeched our huntress to send the animals of the wood against the warriors clashing their swords in excitement. I mumbled and shouted to the Mother to open her cavernous mouth beneath us and swallow us up into the safety of her gut until the madness had passed.

My prayers were just as futile as the digging. None of it stopped the madmen’s rampage.

Every work of beauty they’d ever made—palace to shop, boats and huts, mosaics and frescos—all turned into towers of ash as the pit grew deeper. Next to the growing pile of earth from the hole, the warriors piled wood town from their homes, boats, and carts. Scrolls and paintings were piled to be lit as tinder.

“Please,” the eldress said when the mad chief called for the ramps to be blocked with us in the deep hole. As the warriors shoved the wood down the ramp towards us, others poured flaming pitch in on all sides of the pit, until we stood in the burning oily stew, not able to plea for our lives. As we cooked, scotching from foot to thigh and falling as muscles melted away in the slurry, our coherent please grew into a song of terrible truths.

The gods must’ve finally heard.

The flames leapt up fast then, ending the others with the burst of quick heat. Taking away their breath so they fell senseless into the conflagration.

All but me.

I burned. I felt every licking flame charring away layer after layer of my youthful flesh. My eyes cooked into stone and the fat inside boiled away and cooked the insides of me into plates of stiff leather. Above, the warriors sang songs of thanksgiving to the sky god, promising their faithfulness. Promising to cleanse the whole earth of nonbelievers.

Under their songs, I heard the whispers.

I heard what the real forces of life promised.

They couldn’t save us from our own rot. Humans hurting humans… ugly as it was, it wasn’t their business. But they could make it mine. They could make me strong enough.

The army marched while the fire still burned. Our sister city, a day to the east, lay open to them like a mother’s hug and they’d take it. They take everything.

I rose when the fire finally burned away all that was weak in me. The ash that colored my ridges and valleys had been my mothers and brothers. The bones shards piercing the blackened underside of my feet had been my children and my grandmothers. My father’s screams lay in my throat ready to vibrate the flesh from their muscles and bones with the songs they’d silenced.

I rose a prophet of a murdered people. A sybil for a civilization made ash.

I followed the stench of their madness.

I moved like a flame across pitch.

I danced like the fire of a sunset.

I’d show them what it felt like to burn.

I’d speak until their arrogant celebrations became blood gurgling pleas.

And I wouldn’t stop because the fire had burned me into an ashy vacuum.

My heart was charcoal.

I was full of a flame that burned only for them.

.

Fiction © Copyright Donna J. W. Munro
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Holding a Candle 
by Donna J. W. Munro 

The candle she lit in his bones was just for show. His ribcage, picked clean a fortnight before, shone bright against the darkness of the sooty chapel walls. So many flames. So many bones.

He’d left her at the beginning of summer. With promises of riches and glory, he’d held the pike he’d never learned to use and wore a shoddy tin helmet looking almost as smart as those who’d prepared and practiced. He was a fool and so was she because she’d believed in him.

“Fool,” she whispered to his bones.

“Longu, finally you honor him. Finally, after all these weeks of dreams.” The priestess whispered from just behind her ear, breath hot and sharp in the cool dark.

What did she know of Longu’s dreams. Her man had been inept as a pikeman, awful as a lover, and didn’t even leave her the pleasure of a child to cement her place in his family home. They’d thrown her out after her month’s blood calling her useless. When he came to her fitful dreams, begging for a flame in his bones she’d laughed at him. He’d have to wander, just as she did night after night. No doorway, no bed, no alley, no tree to call her own. The priestesses made sure that she was chased away soon as she woke.

No rest. No home. Why should he have either when he’d left her this way?

It wasn’t guilt heaped on by his mourning family that finally broke her anger. They didn’t acknowledge her when they passed her begging in the street outside the chapel. They knew what she’d denied him and still wouldn’t lower themselves to help her. It wasn’t his ghost wailing and crying in every quiet moment, in her gut and her sleep. She drank his dream tears and ate every apology he offered like it would fill her emptiness to the top.

What finally drove her into the chapel with a candle to light was an echo. She’d seen a girl like she’d been caught up in her lover’s arms, listening to promises, believing every word because before the shadow of death marks you, when you are young and fresh you are the worst kind of fool. That he and she and they all had these unmarked, untried hearts made them victims of death’s wisdom.

Death was the only lover she wanted anymore.

Lighting the candle honored her dead boy love, but it also gave the burning breath of life back to the one who touches dead eyes and leads the final sleeping songs. The priestesses worshipped the god of light thinking the candles brought his blessings to the dead and living. Let them be fools for a god who stops mattering as soon as breath bubbles up through a mother’s birthing fluid.

“Kindness, Reaper,” she whispered to the dark corners. “Take me into your misty arms.”

In that moment, a sucking breath stole all the lights from the bones lit in the chapel. Worshipers screamed in the sudden dark, stumbling toward the doors. Not Longu. She held her arms up to the swirling darkness. She parted her lips and let all the air press out into the cold mouth of death. It was everything, all at once–man, woman, child to be–and it wanted her.

She lit up with the fire death expelled onto her, licking at her skin, fingers hot and stroking her hair. She screamed in ecstasy as it enfolded her, lighting her edges against the dark.

Longu’s ashes pressed into the ceiling of the chapel, lovely face glittering with a light no water can extinguish. Longu’s bones burn in the dark, an altar to the true god of her chapel. No other bones survive the burning. No other candles will burn inside the hallowed walls. No breath can draw, no stone will crumble.

The ghosts of those who came before bow in front of the altar, call her name along with the reaper, and they infest the dreams of those who have scarless hearts.

.

Fiction © Copyright Donna J. W. Munro
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!