The Birthing

Today the moon was out providing its nightly glow, while the wind blows gently catching the leaves off guard; taking them across pebbled streams although in the presence of footstep sounds, they seemed to stop.
A man trudging heavily along the rickety stone bridge to the marshland found his way to a detour; path of slabs, barely visible to our naked eyes. Moss moist with last times rainy days suffocating each path markings showing its age.
Eerie vibes surround you here as you take in the scenery, the mist begins descending into plain view only helping hide; what is already hard to find.
And the hours are passing into seconds as the figure marches onwards, a faint light emanating from his left hand; the fragment he carries is cursed.
Alfred pauses…

 
He no longer felt like his former self anymore that part of his persona now only memory, Alfred was all but a husk doing a gems bidding.
The shovel he’d been holstering to the secluded area of swamp was all that had been carried; wedging the shovel into dirt this husk began its first task. One and a half feet below the surface was sufficient enough his thoughts told him.
Alfred crouches down to place the fragment into the ground, and then begins smothering it in soil, patting the ground flat as if it were a seed of some kind.
Faint purple lines of light burst free through the newly planted trinket.
Taking a dagger sealed inside his sock Alfred slit his left wrist; smiling lazily almost dreaming in delight as this newly opened wound seeps into freshly disturbed land, feeding the demon stone its supplement.

 Grinning haphazardly now as his mind came back in pieces of puzzle, slowly reminiscing on the love he’d once known; her touch, smell and taste.
Rain was falling now as the lichen creature had predicted. Alfred knew his time had come, if not belated.
The crystal’s dim light shined brighter now, infecting his thoughts again Alfred picked up the silver once more and without emotion portrayed on his face, he cut open his gut and spread them on the surface; repeatedly jabbing his insides as if possessed.
It was the blankness on his face that haunted the swamp besides the hunk of metal now jutting into the flesh and the gem was pleased because this was its first corpse to become planted.
Alfred fed an evil magic this night and started a legend of sorts but his husk was beyond death; it was growing.

 
As year’s came to pass the reefs and reeds died whilst trees stood silent in fear. Dreary patches of sky lines and grey spread like a virus through the landscape and the crows came to sit cackling at pedestrians and carriages along the main route. Even sunlight seemed to avoid this dome of harsh surroundings, causing triumph for mist that had always been here frightening passers-by like a native ghost.

Lavishing its new environment the buried stone-piece had made Alfred pick was perfect; people always seemed to get lost and find their way to the newly growing apparition. It was still a sapling made of corpses each body it sustained slowly forming a trunk, a pillar; each limb and leg depicted branches in peculiar form.

Enticing people closer with its natural strangeness, there was beauty in the pale skin of the trunk of bodies and we always like to touch as well as see; time did not decay them. This was the magic’s lure of course mesmerizing all whom came to close, unfazed into committing sensual suicides upon the tree.

Twelve years have gone by and the tree of remains is yet to be discovered, people pass-by often nowadays and it has fed on many souls; merchants, peddlers, nobodies, the rich and poor it feasts on humans galore!
From the distance the long curling nails protrude up towards the horizons, maroon now licks the tips of bone-like leaves and they leak blood back down into the sodden soils below.
While this plant was a demon, a curse it harbored beauty in ugly manifestations of life and without intoxicating humans, it would surely be found and destroyed as is their nature.
Yet…
One day a pregnant woman had lost her way she’d seen the hollow hidden by all kinds of decrepit.
There lay a rusty dagger; she performed the ceremony of Tunsis pouring that elixir of life into the unholy grounds.
Where the fragment holds tar-black secrets in the bridge-fabling land. It’s assortment of limbs caressing at the woman and groping her in closer, the succor given by corpses that yearned her.

As she dies, she begins the birthing process and the child is pale. What had the Tree Of Corpses planned to do with this child?
Perhaps only time can tell us the answers.