The Marrow Gatherer and the Rotten One

by Nichole L. Lightner

In a hollow under a dead tree, Clementine hummed an old song to honor the disciples. The song was a tradition passed down from her mother, and her mother’s mother, all the way back to the ones that named the celestial bodies blazing in the sky. Black stars burned in the afternoon’s amber sky, radiating hazy red and purple halos.

Around her, the strangled disciples’ bodies swayed from leafless tree branches, bramble thorns scratched against yellowed bones bulging up from the dirt, and scuttlers danced along the teeth in the trunks of the trees. Clementine sang to bring all the dead disciples peace. To beseech the Great Ones as they did was a cruel life to choose. The path to become an Idol, long-lived and educated in the deepest mysteries of the sky, was dangerous, and the disciples whose minds and bodies broke were brought here to the Starlit Woods, to Clementine’s trees. They died here, with Clementine and the Rotten One. This was also tradition, as ancient and revered as the Great Ones.

The dead disciples’ flesh belonged to the Rotten One, and their eyes belonged to the many-winged mavens. The bone-aphids made their nests in what remained, and Clementine, the marrow gatherer, burned the thin husks of the disciples’ bones in a small, sacred pyre and took the honey. (Continue Reading…)