Unreal, Unearthed | Azriel x reader

Chapter I.

CHAPTER I.

Death came to you as a girl; vehement, cruel, and annihilating. Five men of Spring that came under cover of dark to take all your girlhood in the name of retribution for your fathers hubris.

What is it they say about the sins of the father?

The visions come in flashes of emerald, lilley white and red-- so much red. You blood coated the damp earth like morning dew. The smell of it-- thick and ferrous in the mountain air.

Blood begets blood.

Your murder had been repaid in kind and the Lady of Spring's blood turned all the white roses red.

The fear that comes next was worse. Not fear. It's more jagged than that. The agony subsides and as the world fades to darkness around you, a strange kind of hunger that creeps in like sunlight.

Death is a peculiar yearning. Yearning. How soft a word for such a ravenous feeling.

Death feasts upon you like a swarm of sun-bleached locusts or perhaps like ravens as they descend upon a carcass. Until all that is left is an assortment of bones, interred in some unforgiving blue-darkness, further than Hel.

And from that blue-darkness you find breath:

Rebirth tastes like blood. The fetor of decay is thick on your tongue; putrid and so palpable you can taste it. It lingers there. Festering fruit-flesh in the damp heat and hemlock flowers whose roots arch out to kiss the skin that crawls from you. The earth holds your weight gently in her arms in those first few moments, it's soft and tender. Unyielding and a little oppressive. You're shrouded in the soil, saturated in the shades of umber and coal that bind you to this world.

Here, in the dark; all maggots and rot in the grave dirt, rebirth calls to you, like a hand reaching through the veil. And you reach back.

Your girlhood and the innocence of your youth died with you and what comes back is born wrong. With the knowledge of the ancient darkness from which we are born, and to which we one day return.

And you must carry that darkness with you.

All the way home.

This is the price you pay for rebirth.

Crawling from your tomb you awaken with a shift in the muddy earth-- the ground shakes with it and whisps of gold and silver flame arise in your minds eyes as the power washes over you.

It makes its home in you.

It calls you back from the darkness in which you lay and awakens something laid dormant for centuries, amongst the dying moonflowers and jasmine. Something archaic and old as the world itself. Speaks to you in a language so old that only you and the earth might know its meaning.

It calls you and you answer.

Your primal need to survive awakens with it. It grows in you and festers there. Taking root in your body. A slow, manifesting ache that spreads through you like disease. Like rot. Until your muscles begin to ache and atrophy as you claw at the grave that holds your body down.

You emerge from the grave reaching and aching. Savage and sentimental. Clawing ceaselessly at the loose dirt until your fingertips feel the cool breeze as they surface through the wintry earth.

The hum of the forest lulls you into a misty sense of consciousness as breath comes to you slowly. That first breath burns like cold death as you inhale sharply letting it kiss its brutal way down your throat and sets atrophied organs afire.