The Nightmother
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V O I D A N D V E N O M
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Dathomir had been the cradle of countless Witches across the fractured annals of its blood-soaked history—some born of its crimson soil and howling winds, others drawn there by the ancient Calling or dragged in chains by those foolish enough to believe they could tame its daughters. The planet hoarded memories like a jealous lover; for the Unholy Matron, that was a grotesque understatement.
It had been an age since Santeria last set foot upon its fractured ground—long since she had stalked the shadowed territories of the Frenzied River Clan, long since she had carved out the throats of those who sought to drag Dathomir and all her fierce daughters beneath the yoke of foreign control. She had bled for that vision, come within a breath of dying for it, her body a map of sacrifices offered on the altar of freedom. Just as so many of her coven had bled and broken beside her.
Now—this Dathomir felt like a stranger’s skin stretched over familiar bones. A time and a world she no longer recognized.
A shadowed fragment of her blackened soul still wept for Dathomir—quiet, relentless, like blood seeping through old bandages—until the sharp sting of second-hand embarrassment crushed it beneath its weight. Santeria could not fathom it, could not stomach the very idea of being controlled by another, of bending knee to rules that spat upon everything the Witches had ever bled and died for. Subjugation was a poison she had long ago vomited from her veins.
She voiced it only once—a jagged, fractured thing that tore from her throat like a confession caught on a hook—to Cain. He was her mirror and her monument, the man who had navigated the labyrinth of her soul and survived the wreckage of their shared history. He had stood through the fire—and the ash that inevitably followed—remaining the only anchor capable of grounding her soul beneath the bruised, alien sky of a world that felt fundamentally wrong.
The truth of her resurrection was a secret guarded with a lethality that bordered on the divine. To anyone else, such an admission would have been extracted only by the bite of steel and the promise of an ending—swift, cold, and absolute. Her name was already a stain upon history, woven into the vellum of forbidden tomes and scrawled in the margins of texts that turned the stomach of the righteous. She was a legend to some—a blight to others—but to the world at large, she was a shadow that had long since dissipated.
For the moment, she leaned into that obscurity with a fierce, bitter satisfaction. She was a relic of an era long, long ago—a ghost draped in the deceptive warmth of living flesh—content to haunt the periphery of a civilization that had dared to continue in her absence.
Heels clacked sharply against the worn stone floor as Santeria moved through the threshold, her heather eyes narrowed ever so slightly beneath the weight of memory. This place had once been a temple, a sanctum where she had spilled blood and devotion at the feet of the Fanged God—where her screams of faith had mingled with the howls of the clan. Now it was nothing but hollow memories, echoes trapped in cold walls that no longer answered back.
Instead, it had been reduced to a shoppe, a gaudy little den peddling the occultism her kind had bled into legend. Cheap trinkets dangled from hooks and cluttered shelves: crystals that held no power, runes carved by hands that had never known sacrifice, baubles meant to mimic the old ways for tourists and pretenders.
Santeria scoffed, the sound low and venomous in her throat. None of it impressed her—not even slightly. And that, in itself, was a feat all unto itself. Her lips—full and painted the color of bruised plums—curled in a silent, visceral rejection of the surrounding dross.
She came to a halt—a sudden, jarring stillness—as a young attendant fluttered into her periphery. The girl was a frantic thing, all bright eyes and rehearsed hospitality, her voice chirping like a sparrow before a storm. She spoke of legends—of stories woven into the trinkets Santeria had already dismissed—her tone an insult to the quiet gravity Santeria preferred. The air grew thick, stagnant with the girl’s unearned confidence, until the question finally settled in the space between them—a cloying, unwanted odor.
Santeria shifted her gaze, turning those heather eyes—pale, cold, and shimmering with the light of a dying star—upon the girl. There was no warmth in the contact, only the clinical precision of a ritual blade finding its mark.
"Do I look like I care what you have to say?"
The question wasn't a request—it was an execution. Her voice remained low, a subterranean rumble laced with the weight of centuries and the sharp, metallic tang of contempt. She didn’t need the theatrics of a scream—power of her vintage didn't require volume. The temperature in the cramped stall plummeted, the ambient heat of the market sucked away by a sudden, unnatural draft. The attendant recoiled, her smile fracturing as she looked into Santeria’s eyes and finally saw the truth—that she was standing in the shadow of something ancient, something unforgiving, and something that viewed her life as nothing more than a flicker of dust in the dark.
"The stars don't grant wishes; they witness our crimes."
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