High Elve of Red Hallow

CHAPTER 15: Obedience

Locked in the hall of Cardamon Castle, Queen Seseh sat on her throne. Seseh's skin sagged, her muscles and bone melted like wax and she defied her false Goddess. Below the throne was a puddle of mud. Her purple gown was no longer suitable. Her dress, her crown, her rings, and her bracelets were falling loose. The golem of clay sat nonetheless, defying Vanice. She wouldn't kneel and worship someone who flaunted her naked form, seduced those she wasn't in love with, and incited a war based on lies.

"I do not care if you use Ezekiel's solution or not. I shall sit and melt. After all, you only created me as a vessel." Said Seseh, forcing her words out. Every syllable dripped with anger.

"I know the truth, Vanice. You are weak and pathetic. The Goddess? My creator?" Seseh paused to let her insults sink in then continued, "The Nymph of the North is a false Goddess." She said to the empty hall where the birds scried about. Even they were dwindling.

"Yes, you heard me. Vanice is the Goddess of lies, so she is a lie."

Seseh watched as her chest swelled and emptied into a bubbling mass beneath her. Her eyes liquefied like water. Vanice, the monster inside Seseh, swelled with rage.

"Enough," Vanice shouted through her thrall. "You are my child, but you do not have to act like one!"

She looked like a sitting, rotting body. Melting. Like a decaying corpse, only much worse. Amazing Seseh could withstand it, much less against the Nymph's power. She was young and beautiful; now more reduced to a heaping mound of melting clay.

Vanice inhabited the putrid Seseh form, punishing her, and watching her liquefy. The woman she had made to be a beautiful queen to control was now reduced. The queen's hall smelled like Fonde's wet soil mixed with a worn body. What birds were left didn't help as they molted through the air. Dozens of fowl tried to fly away, out through the closed stained glass windows only to smack against them. They had abandoned her too. The life in the room was gone, giving it a dead smell.

The queen thrall wasn't going to give up her rebellious attitude toward Vanice. No more would she be controlled. She'd become a melted-ravaged face of goo and die in full darkness first. Vanice, the Nymph of the North, the elven witch, Valaria, mistress of fowl had become what she feared most. Nothing. NOTHING, the one word stood out above all words. It was a measure of the witch's undoing and she wanted recognition. She wanted prestige and wanted to rule Fonde Ssique.

Vanice needed a form to inhabit. She'd have to settle for that which was withering away.

The birds swirled inside the extravagant chamber in front of them, hitting walls and windows, darkening the room in a blight of feathered darkness. 

'CAW' 'LET US GO!' they flapped leaving behind falling, drifting feathers.

'CAW' 'NOTHING! YOU ARE NOTHING!' Crows, ravens, and blackbirds alike flew into each other:

Pure chaos.

The room was a mess.

'CAW' 'Vanice is nothing and will always be nothing!' With every insult they made, it sent Vanice back to Hilltop. Some of Seseh's skin had been taken by the birds. A few pieces of uneaten flesh from her body lay in a messy clay-like heap in the middle of the floor.

A memory called Vanice back. 

'CAW' 'We disown you!' they squawked. 

She remembered the place she had once called home. Vanice and her parents had been eating dinner. Hilltop, an elven society she deeply hated.

****

'CAW' Vanice's memories continued, one of her mother, Liva Leot Rishon if she could even be called mother. An obese, disgusting elven woman. If they would sit down to dinner, she wasn't cooking and neither was her father, Snotra Waya Rishon. They smoked their wood norches and ate like tyrants devouring a small colony. The portions were small and not hardly enough to feed Vanice.