Emily

Micron Inks.


Story & Illustration comissioned by [link]

Story;


"Mason wandered in his thoughts as he often did while locking the doors to the Orphanage. He thought of how old his child might be today if the sickness had not taken him. He thought of his wife, and how now more than ever he needed her council. It was just this morning that the Surgeon had told Mason that the sickness was taking him, that he would have to leave the children’s care to another. For if Mason continued taking after them the sickness would surely consume them as well. Mason scripted letters immediately to his brother beyond the borders of the city, requesting them take charge of the children in their cottage along the windy mountain pass leading to the Southern Plateau. The Surgeon generously offered to care for the children until word had been received from Mason’s brother. He would insure that they were well fed and well slept and all necessary precautions were taken to ward the sickness away from their doorstep. Mason turned the orphanage key one final time, a resigned sadness swimming in his eyes, but the thought that these children might escape the sickness and the accursed city, this was enough to give him the strength to turn the latch, and walk away.

The children wept from within the Orphanage, they could not understand why their surrogate father had abandoned them. And indeed Mason looked to them as his own children, especially after the death of his own young Bradley. Mason was so focused on the children’s weeping, breeding an ache that wrestled deep in his heart, he barely felt the cleaver that severed his spine and left his entrails chasing after his falling legs. The slice was exact, precise, it left him alive and lucid but paralyzed with the growing cold that wafted in thin tides from the legs he no longer possessed. The Surgeon stood over him; carefully plucking the keys from Mason’s shaking fingers. But the Surgeon’s face which normally had promised a calm council to those in his care was now twisted into a sickening smile. A smile which drove sharp thorns through Mason’s bleeding gut, which Mason noticed, seemed to have none of the symptoms he had seen on those other unfortunates dead now from the sickness.
The Surgeon stepped over Mason, and walked toward the Orphanage. He had Mason’s keys more as a precaution than a necessity. One of his subtly carved tunnels would give him access to the children as he pleased, but disposing of the keys would insure that the Watch would not interfere in the Surgeon’s affairs. The orders from Lord Morsander to Drennon’s healers had already been scripted; if Mason were to return alive through their circle he was to be immediately remanded into the Surgeon’s care. Just as each other unfortunate diagnosed with the sickness. The letters to Mason’s brother were intercepted and replaced with clever forgeries that requested he and his family make their way to Morsander immediately and join Mason for holiday. The Surgeon had exquisite plans for them upon their arrival. And the children, the Surgeon had long coveted them. Anathane had visited them often, insuring that the Surgeon’s grasp could not take hold of them. But now Anathane held no Lordship over the living, and his men were useless, leaderless. The Surgeon took the keys to the Chamber of Theng, where they would be easily disposed of.

It was three suns until the children had resigned themselves to sob quietly in their corners. Three more until their blank stares became ravenous, covetous. The Surgeon would enter quietly in the night, filling the children’s water bowls with the flesh and blood of those victims not truly infected with the plagues that he had propagated. It only took two days for the children to be able to consume these provisions without vomiting. After two weeks of providing them these rations, the Surgeon had stopped visiting, but he still listened. From the darkness of the cellar below he had listened as the Children ripped each other apart. It took sixteen nights until the orphanage had grown quiet. The Crimson Watch assuming that the screams implicated the children dying of the sickness, so they had not deemed to interfere.
After the sixteen nights were over the Surgeon finally withdrew the stone covering of the cellar and entered within the Orphanage. All was still, all but one. The remains of sixteen children, one for each night of screaming, lay scattered across the cobblestone floors. But one child, the seventeenth, stared at the surgeon with her cold black eyes. Mason would have known her as Emily, the oldest of the children aged at thirteen cycles, but the Surgeon knew not her name. He noted calculativly that the only injuries sustained by the girl were upon her arms and face, caused when her younger victims had intended to defend themselves. The eyes of seventeen little boys and girls lay collected upon Emily’s lap. This startled the Surgeon, not only that the girl would go to such care to remove the trophies from the meat that had been otherwise gnawed upon and consumed. But that she had torn out her as well, leaving only those cold black sockets that now stared back at the Surgeon. Her teeth gnawed against each other, filling the Orphanage with the hollow sound of their grinding. Until finally little Emily, stained by the desperate hands of her victims, laid back against the wall. She lay back, but she would never truly rest."


- me.