An Immaculate Conception

 

Exiled from the shoal they fall.

The five unhomed, they fall then swim then crawl through tepid ocean, swamp and star-decked cavern.  Voiceless, sightless, barely sensate...

 

To

 

A vagrant dying on the Old Ghost Road.

Ten years nameless.

Twelve unloved.

Five forgotten.

A widow's son.  Old key keeper crook-legged slope head sucks them in with a tortured breath.  Feels their anchor in his arid guts and promises for five more years of life he'll carry them and on demand his lower bowel will be their birth canal.

 

Five years finds him...

 

Squatting, weeping, straining in a moonlit oval.

Quoth he dark parables and eldrich psalms whilst they played botties and shared each others waters, roiling in the turbid amnium.

One last wet heave and out they slop.  Vermillion skin and milky eye, blind like fishes from the deepest deep, butting soft heads on the harlot stones that pave their birthing chamber.

No baby games for these wretched gets in their nursery of bones and rusting pipes and rotting ledgers, but they grow strong and full of heart on the meat of their begetter.  And when the meat was gone and they were grown, the gears above began to grind, filling their hair with flakes of rust.

 

One voice said;

"This river winds a crooked course."

And one voice said;

"Crowfoxbrockhareviper."

And one voice said;

"The half-faced pig is near to death."

And one voice said;

"Let it die, its paps are dry."

 

And then an age of whispers, a slow flood of words and arcane cyphers.  A glint of gold, the gleam of bone. 

 

The Immaculata ushers her brood before her along the Old Ghost Road...