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mattwritesmonsters · 1 year

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Monster Lady Knight

Taking a brief break from writing my current novel "Imago" to sketch out something more medieval fantasy. Based the vibes on my love of FromSoftware's worlds, but other than that I just made shit up.

CW for gore, death, crawly nasty things, and body horror. Questionably positive CW for tentacles.

At sunset, a hollow-eyed steed arrives at the gates of Tur. A destrier, once. Its sockets gape black. Its albino hide ripples with maggots beneath it. Its walk seems slow, yet in a short time it covers greater ground than a messenger gelding’s gallop.

Atop rides a manikin knight. Her chitinous armour folds over her slender stature like petals. Each plate is opalescent and white. The cuirass is deformed, exaggerated in its curve, as if the knight’s chest might distend like a fish bladder. She wears no chainmail. Where the chitinous armour can’t cover her, over the underside of joints and the neck, there is taut skin-like fabric. The white helmet ends in a tall ashen plume. The visor is down, and through its breaths a sickly light glows like a will-o’-wisp, the knight’s features completely obscured.

No guard stops her. No name nor banner is asked for. Only one watchman sits in the stone tower, and he’s too busy trembling in fear and sweating his shirt off.

Residents likewise hide from the manikin knight. Tur is a small town, cosseted by fast stone-toothed rivers and hills that break spines. The only man-made defenses are arbalests, all poised skyward, and a paltry volunteer regiment. Tur has a plan for dragons and for invading infantries. When a puppet of a sin-god passes the gate, there is no longer a plan.

Ruddy dust puffs at the destrier’s hooves. The horse itself makes no sound besides a faint thronging squelching. In the dead silence of Main Street, the knight’s breath is ghostly and loud.

The knight doesn’t stop before the monastery’s chapel. Sister Moranna tries to convince herself that’s for the best; perhaps the knight is just passing through. It’s unorthodox to journey through mountains rather than circumvent them, but still, there’s a path to Zaferes through Tur. Caravans ride by on occasion.

Despite Moranna’s best efforts, anxious thoughts surface like bloated corpses. What if the knight knows?

The puppet horse walks, unmistakably, to the mausoleum. To the hexagonal god-tomb at the heart of the monastery courtyard, a nexus garlanded with supplicant statues. And all the many glimmering candles, all the incense and flowers and food, can't help fix Tur’s secret: Tur-god has left its tomb.

Only the Emissary and the inner circle of the monastery is to know. To the people of Tur, there’s still someone holding the threads of their fates. Someone to shift falling rocks away from the hunters’ heads. Someone to hold a birthing man’s life-thread away from deathly haemorrhage. Someone to tell them what purpose their life will best serve, and to ensure it continues within unconquered walls. After finding the god-tomb tracelessly empty, the monastery resorted to the oldest trick in the book.

To bullshit.

The moment Moranna thinks this, the knight’s horse halts before the sealed doors of the mausoleum. The setting sun bleeds up the horizon and haloes the knight’s nigh-translucent figure with red, the helmet plume like a distortion of air above fire. The manikin holds the reins passively. Her head tilts at an odd angle, like a limb of a chewed dog toy. Moments trickle past; the sky slowly darkens, but the manikin does nothing more.

Mother of Threads, please, let her be our last. Let no more manikins come to our doorstep. Let the gods of sin stay their eyes from our town.

The chapel doors burst open. Precisely opposite Moranna’s chamber window, tall oakwood flings apart, rusted hinges shrieking.

Sister Ogdena steps into dying light.

A young maid, she is. Her earth-black habit is still rich in its colour. Her face is unmarred by the sun.

The manikin knight’s head swivels west to face Ogdena. The rest of the body follows shortly after, as the horse shifts to align.

In Ogdena’s eyes burns a tear-stained desperation. Fear, shut tight.

“The Mother repaid my offering,” Ogdena says. “You’ve arrived.”

It’s all Moranna can do not to thud her fist against the stone wall. The monastery should’ve never accepted those plague-ridden children. Everyone knows a slow death is their fate. All the Grand Cleric achieved is provoke a moron’s compassion—a moron that sent for a sin-god’s knight! Does Ogdena—this girl, this child—think the tall tales of sinners are true? That the manikins offer anything but destruction? Lies, all of it, sinners’ lies.

Meanwhile the knight dismounts. She does not tie her steed down; it stands abjectly still. Sister Ogdena watches. The idiot’s hands are clasped before her and her head is held high. Doesn’t fool Moranna. Even from her window, she can see those hands shudder.

The knight walks. The motion is not articulated. Only the legs step, while the torso and head glide unmoving. Moranna is paralysed as she watches the manikin breach her home of twenty-five years, unharmed.

Not just unharmed. Invited.

She slaps herself out of it—not on her fucking watch.

Moranna doesn’t bother with the habit; the chemise will do. Her candle trembles as she runs down the halls that curve round the courtyard towards the infirmary—Mother of Threads, fuck and burn that fucking infirmary.

She’s too late. By the time Moranna reaches the vaulted hall of twenty straw sickbeds, the manikin knight already stands in its centre, and Sister Ogdena, the fool, flanks her side.

Shamefully, Moranna hopes for sudden deaths. The children are almost at their end anyway. Nine frail bodies, skin over bone, breathing shallow and fast. The nuns have taken great care to bandage all skin lest vile blood seeps through, but these children have bouts of horrific thrashing, and some gauze came undone. Wherever Moranna can see skin on them, it’s all pustulated.

“Please,” Ogdena murmurs.

The knight unfurls a finger. Choose one.

Moranna must stop them. She must. Only her legs hold her hostage, motionless like the knight’s abomination of a steed, and her mouth is clamped thoroughly shut.

Ogdena doesn’t bargain. She must’ve known that would be the deal; hoped, perhaps, otherwise. The fool sister is pale as the knight’s armour, but unlike Moranna, she’s not immobilised.

She points to the bed of the smallest child.

Moranna must stop them.

She can’t.

The manikin knight glides to the sickbed, and Moranna could swear the feet aren’t touching the ground. Sheer gossamer threads unspool through gaps between petals of chitin, and twist into pale white tentacles that remind Moranna of pus. In a moment all the gauze is unbound. Underneath lies what must’ve once been a girl, or at least something with a body of one.

The manikin’s touch is, perhaps, gentle. A sin-god’s puppet is hard to judge by her mannerisms. A tentacle alights on a sore on the girl’s stomach, between rib and hip bone. The image makes Moranna think of a rider pierced by a pike. Without any good reason, she’s convinced the tentacle is razor-sharp.

It discharges something silver. Something liquid, crawling. It makes a quiet and horrible sound Moranna can’t help but want to forget.

Instead she remembers. She’s heard it before, this indescribable shriek-sigh-laugh, and she’s seen this silver. She’s seen it all when her first home fell and became the maggots’ breeding ground.

It seems the Mother of Threads repays Moranna’s offerings, too. Because that’s the only thought that could’ve ever propelled her cowardly body to fight.

She dashes for Sister Ogdena. Grabs the fool by the meat of her arm.

“You fucking twit!” Moranna screams. “What’ve you done?!”

The unthinkable. The fool, the idiot, the cunt has done the unthinkable. Even if the cursed manikins never return in greater numbers, the monastery is indelibly marked. Tur will whisper. Tur will fear. Fewer and fewer will come to the chapel to receive assurances from the nuns that yes, Tur-god really does keep them safe. Tur-god is here. Tur-god yet loves.

They will doubt. Weigh the facts of their hard lives against pious words.

The bullshit is done.

“Do you want Tur godless? Worshipping sin?!” Moranna is shaking Ogdena like the fool nun is a lifeless puppet. “Do you know what you’ve done?!”

And then she finds out:

The tentacle really is sharp.

It slashes her across the stomach with the force of a warhammer. The pinpoint precision, however, is that of a longsword in a warrior’s arms. It curves around Ogdena and finds Moranna’s gut, eviscerating her instantly. The force flings her against the infirmary altar. Right where the Grand Cleric lays offerings for the sick to survive.

Moranna doesn’t die in that moment. Instead her second worst dream comes to life. She’s expiring through one of the slowest, worst wounds imaginable, and it burns like a thousand dragons, and it reeks of shit and of piss and of blood. Her gore splatters over a holy site, and she’s alive to see it. Alive for a little while longer but already rotting, wallowing in the knowledge she’s failed to stop the doom of her town.

The manikin knight turns her back to Moranna and faces the fool nun. Ogdena looks like she’ll vomit.

“Do it,” she says, averting her eyes from what became of her fellow. “Do it now.”

Every sin is a debt. And some debts are paid at once.

Ogdena’s eyes flare open with wordless shock as the knight lifts her visor. Moranna tries to keep the world from fading, tries to witness, at least to finally know what in godless hell that helmet hides. But the blackness of death is already eating at her sight.

She doesn’t see the source of Ogdena’s horror. Moranna’s head lolls, unable to hold its weight. All she manages to catch is a glimpse of the sick girl’s body.

No pustules. No bleeding sores. A normal girl. A healthy girl with only one white wound shaped like a many-limbed star. Like the point of impact on shattering glass.

Only then is Moranna over. In agony and disbelief, the end of her thread comes.

#writing #dark fantasy #lady knight #monster lady #god forbid women do anything #body horrow cw #violence cw #medieval fantasy #dark souls #soulsborne

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