Ummmm this is dark? Like I'm fucked up?
TRIGGER WARNINGS: depictions of self harm and suicide, hints of rape and mentions of people eating people.
I don't know why I'm like this.
(Warning: this was not proof read, I literally just wrote it and posted it. I haven't even re-read it.)
Darkness was known to be evil, dangerous and killer. Terrifying the children and faint of heart, lights in the night to keep the madness at bay. Little royal children wailing at the shadows and waiting for the monsters to crawl out from the bed.
But real monsters didn't hide, Mal knew, they stood in the light, strong and proud and so terribly wicked. Lips curled like poison and there's terror in the bones of the fallen who meet the eyes of the villain. Real monsters don't hide in the shadows, the people hide from the monsters in the dark.
The isle was a hell on earth, strewn with suicidals and drunken children, little skeletons with skin stretched thinly across their jutting bones. This was a place for the monsters who stalked the streets and took what they saw fit, took loot and lives and the innocence of ones once pure. Stained minds and bodies with sin and inky evil that curdled words like milk in a sauna. This was the land of the suffering sinners, cast to hell without repentance.
There was madness in the land, lips stained red with blood and curses that tumble with the illness that ails the mind. Suffer or die, take your last breath and know the pain. Forgotten on an isle full of darkness, so many people hiding, so many monsters standing.
Death would be better than this, Carlos tells her one day, curled over his own bloody body, painted with pain and the dismissal of a life all because of the blood they shared. Mal knows the boy is terrified of becoming as mad as his mother, terrified he already is.
Death was kind, a gift from the gods. But pride was pride, and lines were lines, bloody red cuts on the insides of her thighs, neck, and wrists. She'd seen it before, seen them fall from cliffs and knifes, seen them wail in the streets but no one would come. They were all suffering the same fate, they knew the pain, they knew what would come. The monster was the land itself at this point, may as well burn the damn isle into the sea, Jay had muttered over her head. For the roots of the trees are as evil as the devils and the horns, the demons and the thief's. The dirt was as wicked as the demons, every blade of grass a blade that had sliced the life away from the hurting.
The cliffs had seen deaths and laughed, the sea had swallowed the bodies. The bloody lines were eaten away by the starving children, little bird cage ribs that gave way to the illness of the cannibals. Let them tear themselves apart, because death was a kinder fate than at the hands of the monsters, slaves to the royals, locked away on an isle of flames and fire and purple lips and rotted eyes. Let them starve and fling themselves into the sea, let them suffer at the hands of their own blood, because this was what sinners deserved. This is what defines you, the blood in your wrist?
We are punished. Evie tells her, her eyes are stone cold but her blood is hot under Mals fingers. We are guilty by association.