prompt for warrior nun (u know i’m going to send poetry)
“i ease the spade from her hand: i explain/ we aren’t here to eat, we are being eaten/ come on, pretty girl. let us devour our lives.”
hot damn ur rly on a natalie diaz kick huh
-
butterflies turn to snakes in the span of a step, twisting in her insides when the shop door swings open with barely a touch.
(hello, my name is yasmine amunet, dies on her tongue after a thousand practiced murmurs, useless and without recipient in the empty room.)
this is new, she thinks. grips the leather strap of her bag until it creaks. plenty of dirt and debris, sand and loam and broken clay, but lacking a tell-tale layer of even dust.
too new.
glass cracks underneath her slow steps, heart thudding loud in her chest. there is a metallic tang underneath the earth and must.
the stairs down are laughably easy to find, path scraped clear by the march of boots.
(there is no noise, save for the measly hello? she sends to the yawning dark.)
she swallows the rest, and heads down.
-
[[smth smth insert let there be light. and he saw that it is bad.]]
-
she knows bodies. she knows rigor mortis. she knows that the average human body contains around 1.2 to 1.5 gallons of blood and how nobody that has lost a gallon of it can end outside a grave.
(knows how, had she made it here even an hour earlier, she would be with them on the ground too.)
in the corner, blood smeared in uncoordinated swipes, is a map she had tried to find once, now gone mute.
(hello, hello, hello, she knows it will say if she gives it life.)
her hand reaches for the lever, and pauses before the last inch. hovering. trembling. the only breathing thing beneath the floor.
(if she turns it on, would she find survivors?)
there is reason that both Orders have been hidden from the history of the world.
(if she turns it on, would she only call back the devil?)
and there is reason - there must be - that she is led to stand here at this hour.
(still. her name is yasmine amunet.)
she flips the switch.
