deepwaterwritingprompts: Text: “I need my bones read.” “But you’re
deepwaterwritingprompts: Text: “I need my bones read.” “But you’re still alive,” says the young man, doubtful.“I was hoping you could work around that.” Long, long ago, before the first sun had dawned, Jackal sat beneath the moon and pondered the dark sky, and in his miserable squalid home felt consumed by its vastness. He felt a shiver run down his spine, and it was then that Jackal knew that one day even the barren earth itself would fall away and be no more. The thought unnerved him, and sent him wandering restless up and down the plains, seeking answers. He saw a crow perched high on a tree and called out: “Sister Crow! How high you have soared into the mouth of the sky, over the edges of the earth! Tell me, have you seen its end?” But the crow glared at him with black eyes and flew away. Further along in his roaming he found a man crouched by a fire, tossing bones into the embers and peering at the cracks. Jackal padded over to him, mouth a-grin. “Brother, what do the bones say?” he called out. “Do they tell you how the world shall die?”The young man eyed him cautiously. “No. Nothing like that. Where to hunt, and what the sky shall be tomorrow, but nothing so far away as the world’s end.” “Then read my bones,” Jackal offered, “and find the end of the world in them.” “But you are still alive,” said the young man, doubtful. “There are ways around that,” Jackal said. Jackal gathered together wood and built a great pyre that burned so bright it scorched the sands yellow, and walked inside it. He shrieked and howled and twisted and burned until the fire died down and the world was dark again, and only his bones were left. Then the man took Jackal’s scapula and read the cracks in it, darkening them with ink, and felt a mounting horror with what he saw. He took the bones of Jackal’s hand and carved sigils in them, casting them and reading how they lay, again and again until the message was unmistakable. Then, acting on Jackal’s instruction, he took all the bones and reassembled them in the remains of the fire, so that Jackal’s shape was made anew in the ashes. And Jackal shook himself, and wrapped sinew around bone, and stood. “And what did you see? How does the world die?” he said, his back all gray and singed with ash, and in a shaking voice the man told him of the horror he had seen written in the bones. “Ah,” said Jackal knowingly, and opened his mouth and tore out the man’s throat, so that he would speak no more of this to anyone. Thus Jackal kept his secret. But where his scapula had cracked, one shoulder hung lower than the other; and the bones in his hand had been arranged as they had fallen, and so the fingers of that hand hung backwards and twisted. And so of all creatures, Jackal alone bears the world’s end written in his bones, marked out in each step. And this is why Jackal limps through the world with one withered arm, making his crooked way towards its end. -- source link
#fiction