The Denizens

7 days.

It had been 7 days in the mudlands of Ladyr, yet her blood still flowed, down her wrists, off the tips of her fingers, into the black clay on which she lay. Everytime the wounds would clot, she would cut into them some more, pulling off her fresh scabs, rending her flesh further. Being the daughter of a butcher had taught her a few tricks, how to make the animal last, keep it just alive, dripping.

Like the animal, she lasted, her eyes glued to the horizon, the empty, black lands with just mud and dead marsh as far as the eye could see. The skies didn’t exist above the mudlands; for the heavens are said to be infinite yet the space above Ladyr seemed bound, chained, there to hold its denizens within, so that they may never leave.

Yet who are these denizens?

No life seemed to exist here. No river cut through these lands. No mangroves thrived in these soils. It felt akin to a nomad’s mansion.

These Denizens, they were who Lores hoped would find her and she hoped her blood would be enough to draw them.

Her mother, Agatha, had told her about them. She had seen them as a child with her own eyes, felt them. Their black, unmeasurable forms, their roiling tentacles that screamed in the air like serpents set ablaze, their horrible teeth. Her mother saw all of that, branded into the whites of her eyes. She never forgot them, and she made sure Lores never did either.

Every night she would tell her of them. How she managed to escape, how she felt like she lost a part of her to them, and how they gave her one in return, so that she may never forget. Like the gospel Agatha would recite the tale to her daughter as she cowered under her sheets, milk teeth chattering with cold and fear. It was always the same words, the same grotesque description, the same panic in her voice, the same trauma.

This bled into the days too. Every morning when the sun would try to shine upon Lores, her mother would shield her within their home, reminding her of the dangers outside.

“Bolt the door and don’t open it for anyone. Never let anyone in.”

And so Lores never did. She made friends with the dust that sat atop her shelves, with the water that swam in her well and with the canes that hung in the armoire. She never went to school and she never read a book. Her mother taught her all she knew, all she deemed essential to survive lest the Denizens come. Her mother even taught her to slaughter.

“You have to feel for the strongest pulse, that is where you slice,” Agatha had told her daughter as she grasped the neck of a flailing duck, “but remember, never cut too fast, it ruins the meat.”

So Agatha delayed the death of the poor creature, it pleading for its end as she held its pouring neck, blind to its suffering, never even so loosening her grip.

What of Lores’ father? Where was he? While all the other fathers toiled for their lineages, what of him? Neither Lores knew nor Agatha and that was the truth. Agatha told her how she didn’t even know what he looked like, his face all black. But Lores never felt his absence for she didn’t even know what his presence was supposed to feel like.

Lores grew up like this, from slaughter to solitude to suddenly, loss.

Agatha’s death was quick, karmically too quick. She did not suffer. She did not bleed. She simply closed her eyes one day and never opened them again.

Lores buried her in the soil behind their house, just at the lip of the mudlands and that was it.

Lores first felt her absence when she slept that night, when her memory of the Denizens wasn’t refreshed by her mother. She realized she had to do it herself now and so she did. At midnight, from that day, Lores sat in her bed and recited the the scripture just as her mother would, their vicious teeth, their bloody appendages, the entirety of it all. And so Agatha lived on, not through memories of love and pride as a mother should, but through the tales of vile creatures and fear.

Years passed. Many long, lonely years. Lores survived on her own, managing through butchered birds and her mothers words. She did but nothing else. Dusk and dawn, winter and summer it was the same thing until one night, Lores forgot her mother’s story.

She remembered the emotion behind it, she remembered how she was supposed to cower, but the words eluded her. Perhaps it was her age or a malady of the mind but Lores saw it otherwise. She saw it instead as a fatal mistake, a failure, a call that reminded her of her mother’s demise.

Poor Lores knew of only that her whole life, the fear and the words, it was all her being had amounted to. So when she began to lose that, when she felt it slipping away, she felt stranded, lost, naked.

She finally felt the true weight of her loneliness. She felt the crushing void her mother had orchestrated for her. She felt all of it and all at once.

She screamed in agony as she ran out of her house, out to her mothers grave. She dropped to her knees and began clawing at the dirt, bellowing and moaning at the woman who did this to her, who left her so pitifully afraid that it was the lack of the fear that now tormented her. She sat atop her mothers mud and through choking sobs and broken cries she tried to recite the story out loud, but she couldn't. The more she tried to remember, the foggier it became.

Her mind, now completely lost to the despair, tried to think of a way out. How could she remember the story? How can she refresh the gruesome details of the Denizens of Ladyr? How can she keep her mother alive? She had to see them herself.

Only then she would be able to describe them in the clarity her mother could. Only then her mother would live on. Only then she wouldn’t feel so alone. She stood onto her feet and she began to run, out into the mudlands, out into the Denizen’s territory.

And so she lay, on the silt the devils walked upon, with but not a single one of them in sight.

Her mind was far from functional anymore. No semblance of Lores remained in the corpse that lay broken in the soil.

Everytime she would see a shadow in her periphery she would flit her head to look upon its visage, hoping to see the demons that would bring her doom, only to see the same, barren, desolate mud.

How she prayed to see them bite into her, to see them tear her apart, to see them lap up her blood. Yet nothing. She prayed to be ravaged only so that her mother would be with her one last time, next to her, watching her being devoured.

Her lips were cracked, her blood now dried, she didn’t have long. She understood this. She scoured the horizen, the last time now, her cheek to the ground, her screams scratched into her throat, tears of mud dripping from the corners of her eyes. When finally, at long last, she saw the shadows in all their horrifying glory.

There were four. She tried to stand, to look upon them clearly but her body had died away already, only her waning heart survived.

They were tall. They had long appendages sticking out in absurd angles around them and they ran towards her. One of them even bellowed fire into the darkness, she could almost feel its heat.

They were closer now. She could feel the rumble of their many legs and she could almost hear their growls and dripping saliva. They were coming and she would finally see them, she would finally remember, she would finally be with her mother again.

And so, at last, she was. Her heart gave up just as the Denizens reached her.

They looked upon her, upon the girl who knew only fear, and saw her eyes peeled open to them, bloody red and cracked at the lens, her mouth curled in sick satisfaction blind to the reality that only men stood before her.

The same men that stood before Agatha all those years ago. The same men who defiled her, who feasted on her and took from her what she held the dearest. The same men who raped the poor blind girl. The same men who forced a child onto her. The Denizens of Ladyr, as the denizens of the world. Simply men.

This grim, fantastical tale, from debut writer Aaryan Kapoor, speaks of desolation and depicts how trauma can be hereditary.