Page 78 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

CHAPTER SEVEN

After many days of travel, I found myself in a small village,
its sole redeeming feature a large stone statue carved
sometime during the Great Darkness. With the blackest
of anthracite wings framing a largely skeletal frame, the
clam of death settled like dust across the expertly engraved
nuances of pores and frown-marks. The creature seemed
more breathing flesh than cold stone. Inscribed upon its
base was Mother of the Stillborn. While lacking any Pre-
Darkness existence, the statue was only a graven dream, a
form without substance. But this fact had not stopped cabals
and cults from gathering in its—her—honor.
Where there is mystery, there is religion, so they say,
and the Darkness has been the source of many a new faith,
often to the destruction of an older one. Here was just
such a case—the dark woman seemed to demand a past,
a mythology all her own. It might have been her exquisite
construction, or perhaps her darksome, unending stare that
compelled the specific folklore that was draped across
her delicate frame. Or, more likely, and the reason I much
prefer—the lady herself commanded such supplications, as
she partook of a genuine existence that black stone and story
had only recently caught up with.
Whatever the reason for her rise to prominence, her given
mythology was fairly uniform. She was believed a spirit,
or dour angel, who caught the tiny souls of the stillborn,
replacing them to her own cold, dead womb, to later be

The Red Son | 81