one day the only thing left will be your bones // rotting head

// GORE WARNING + prompt #3 from july challenge

Rosemary smells a wrongness in the air. She first smells it on a breeze: not the wind rolling off the ocean, but the faint rustling from where the ocean’s breeze crashed on the other side of the island. She would leave it alone, tell herself this is the problem of a grim ray to investigate, but she recognizes an edge to the scent. She may be needed; she is the group’s only healer, now, and she cannot turn her back on the wounded or the dying.

Because it is the smell of decay.

She follows the stench to the source, her nose crinkling further and further, until the healer scowls like she’s never scowled before. She has smelled gangrene and amputated shattered limbs at the joint, but she never encountered a heavy evil like this malicious rot.

Finally, she arrives at the railway gates. The ocean breeze rolls off the waves, clearing her nose for an instant, but the stench returns, thick and overpowering; she hurriedly yanks a cloth from her satchel and holds it over her face. Forget the need for ready, sterilized bandages—she cannot stand here without protection. Even with the the cloth over her nose and mouth, the rot leaks in, and her eyes water.

Neck craned back, she lifts her sights to the top of the gate. Where Roxanne mounted Stryker Malus’s head… she sees a mass of boiling flesh and white bone beneath the mush. A single crow perched on one of the head’s antlers looks at her, caws, and flies off with a wad of Stryker’s pale, coarse mane in its beak.

Hissing into the cloth, Rosemary’s eyes squint shut. This is too gross, even for her; she has seen death, tended to bodies, but she never saw a body left to rot in the summer heat.