I still like the idea of a devout religious vampire praying with a rosary and burning it's hands in some kind of masochistic penance for it's sins against nature...
sacrificial lamb redraw since I was never 100% satisfied with the original piece. inspired by cult of the lamb but not necessarily tied to it? i just love playing with religious images in general.
was trying to go with the idea of a sacrificial beast gutting themselves to achieve their own future, instead of being gutted to predict something for someone else. but instead of gore, its more like sheering or skinning. sort of breaking out of your given/expected skin and finding freedom, even if there's a mess.
patrons got this early along with wips
og below
hope there's improvement. i think holding the knife gives them more of a sense of intention at least.
Tw: Child SA (brief and implicit) and mentions of wanking it idk
𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣 † 𐕣
Was it autumn? Winter? Spring? Summer? One could not tell. The air lay in a perpetual lukewarm stupor, and the heavens remained veiled in unmoving cloud, swollen with rain that never fell.
Amid the rubble, a figure emerged, limping toward a building not far ahead.
He crossed a mass graveyard, one consecrated to the fallen sinners of another age. The figure remembers this place; however, yet now it exhaled the stench of true death. Once, the graves had been adorned with flowers and riddled with candles; now the earth that cradled their stones had split open, coffins yawning wide like broken mouths.
Not all the graves had been disturbed. A chosen few remained sealed, untouched, at rest.
The rest had risen.
The sinners had clawed their way free. The figure nodded to himself. They have torn open Hell and dragged themselves back to Earth, bellies scraping the soil as they crawled. They searched, though for what? What they sought could not be found beneath the sky. The only vengeance for their centuries of torment was ascension. Yet their dirt-choked fingers found no purchase upon the clouds, nor upon the firmament itself.
At last, the figure was caught in the weak glow of a seldom-lit streetlamp.
It is a priest.
He still wears his vestments: his clerical shirt, his Roman collar and his cassock trailing behind him like a burial shroud, drinking in dust and filth. He paid it no mind. His gaze was fixed upon the building he now approached.
Why had a priest wandered so far from his home?
He had not. He was home.
The priest straightened and lifted his eyes to the structure before him, wincing. Long before he had doomed the Earth, this church had towered over the village, tending to the sinners and quieting the dead. Now it stood as a husk, hollowed of sanctity.
It had now been gnawed to ruin. The stained-glass windows lay shattered, their colours dead. Cracks veined the foundation like fractures in bone. The doors sagged upon screaming hinges, pleading for oil or obliteration, and the roof gaped open, welcoming fallen debris as a penitent guest.
No. It bore no resemblance to what he remembered.
He stepped inside, hesitant, as though exiled long ago, though no sentence of banishment lingered in his memory. He pressed against the doors, and they groaned as foretold. He peered into the dark beyond.
It was as he had imagined-
A statue fell.
Stone thundered against stone, collapsing before him and sealing his path.
He gasped, trembling, and stumbled back, clutching at the failing door as it gave way beneath him. He fell, scraping his hands and knees, crawling backward, panting, drinking in stolen breaths. He knew its meaning: this was no sanctuary. He was not welcome here.
But where could he flee? This decrepit ruin was his home.
He crawled toward the statue, yielding to the ground, offering neither pride nor defiance. Every movement was a silent plea, a litany of humility carved into the motion of his body.
The statue’s head has been severed, yet its gaze remains fixed on him. The Virgin Mary.
He had recalled that he had asked the sculpture to give all a blank stare, leaving sinners to divine its meaning.
Fear.
She spoke.
He had never imagined such beings capable of it. But the wide eyes, the drawn brows, the parted lips twisted backward into a grimace, this was fear, pure and unrelenting.
He would glimpse it often, masked in human flesh: in the confessionals where sinners unburdened themselves, or upon the trembling mouths of the faithful as he placed the bread upon their tongue.
He lifted his eyes to the desecrated altar. Was it calling for him?
He crawled over the broken statue, casting the Virgin Mary one last plea for mercy. She did not answer. Her eyes did not meet his.
He continued crawling along the crimson carpet, threading between the ruined pews.
The pews. He remembered sitting as a boy, pressed to his father’s side, gazing up at the preacher whose voice rolled like thunder over the congregation. The priest’s name had slipped his mind, but the devotion remained.
The man had surrendered wholly to the Lord: unmarried, fasting, confessing. A paragon.
The boy had begged his father to let him join the Church’s youth program, and with pride, his father consented. He had entered the church with joy in his chest, yearning for his praise, dreaming of becoming a prodigy in the priest’s eyes.
He had laboured to stand apart from the other boys. Always aiding with the masses, always eager, always seeking the front row whenever he was off duty so that the priest might see him.
And he had been seen.
Soon, the priest entrusted him with tasks beyond the altar, chores that required obedience, devotion, and care. He had performed them gladly, without hesitation, every act an offering to the god he adored.
He cleaned, cooked and laboured until his fingers split and bled, until the skin peeled off from his young hands. Even as he sat alone on his bed, worrying the dead flesh between his teeth, he longed only to serve the priest again.
At last, the day came.
The priest told him he required help in one of the inner rooms, his help alone. He called him special. Said he could see his devotion, a rare gift granted by the Lord to very few.
The priest removed his robe and placed it upon the boy’s shoulders.
He remembered the sensation of being sanctified, even as tears streamed down his face, even as he whimpered that it hurt. He remembered the murmured assurances: It is well. This is as it should be.
Suffering, he was told, was the narrow gate. Heaven did not open easily. He had been chosen, set apart from the common sinners. God placed him in the priest’s care to be shaped, to be guided. Now it was his duty to yield, to open himself, to receive what was ordained.
He remembered that day.
His “ordination”.
The priest died a few years after he reached manhood, leaving him to inherit the village’s church.
Big shoes to fill, his father had said.
Those words became scripture to him. He studied them fervently as the Bible itself. They hovered above him when he preached. They whispered when his eyes lingered too long on a woman seated in the front pews. They pressed against his skull as he placed the bread upon her tongue.
Even as he imagined that very tongue wrapped around his cock.
Even as he confessed his love to her. Even when she had told him she was already betrothed to another.
And again when he resulted in relieving himself in the midst of his bedroom.
Yes, even then, these words loomed over his head. They would never leave him alone. They were permanently ingrained and tainted his thoughts, no matter how many times he washed them.
His father’s voice. The village’s murmur. The priest’s breath in his ear. They haunted him with what he would never become.
He needed to prove himself.
But when would God grant him a trial worthy of such devotion?
He stopped crawling and pulled himself upright, gripping the last pew for balance. His eyes lifted to the altar, magnificent, scarred, consecrated. A table meant for worship. A slab reserved for the most dignified of sinners.
Beside it stood the baptismal basin.
His legs failed him.
He collapsed forward, prostrate before the altar. He pressed his forehead against its surface, though some unseen force twisted his head toward the basin. He choked on his breath as tears soaked the stone.
No… he could not look. Not at that.
It had been only months ago, when he still bore the title of a priest. When the village was warm. When the world had not yet turned against him.
There they stood.
A young couple.
He remembered them too well. The man’s hair slicked neatly back, his suit crisp, his smile audacious. How Prideful. The woman was smaller, but held a sort of restrained fury in her small eyes. She would not meet her husband’s gaze. Her clothes pretended at neatness, but up close, the strain showed, creases forced flat, a collar smoothed too many times. She seemed filled with Wrath.
In her arms, she held the child.
She placed him into the priest’s care, and he received the infant, cradling the small weight against his chest. Its eyes were closed. Her hands were cold as a gravestone, yet the child burned, an unnatural warmth, as though fire slept beneath its skin.
He began his prayers. He blessed the couple. He turned towards the basin.
And then he looked again.
The child’s eyes were open.
But they were not the eyes of a newborn. They were deep, dark pools of blood which were fixed upon him with such stillness.
The Devil regarded him.
And he looked back.
This was it. This was the trial he had been begging God for.
He lowered the child’s head into the basin. The water closed over its head.
But he was afraid.
His hands trembled. He could not do it. Not here. Not before them all. They would not understand. They would not believe he was saving them. He would lose everything, his life, his family, the village, the title he had bled to earn.
He held the child beneath the water for a moment too long.
Whispers crept into the air. He felt the couple’s eyes upon him. Panic seized him. He lifted the child quickly and returned it to its mother’s arms.
The prayers left him broken, torn from his throat in dry, stuttering gasps, as though his body rejected the words he had spoken.
He had doomed us.
He watched as the couple carried the child away. Watched as the sinners praised them. Watched as the nuns reached out, brushing reverent fingers along the infant’s legs.
And then…
They were gone.
They were all gone.
Now there was only him.
He drew a shuddering breath as the vision loosened its grip and the present returned.
And then he felt it.
Something stood behind him.
An angel.
It was beautiful in a way no mural, no scripture, no trembling hand of man could ever capture. Its presence crushed him with awe. Ecstasy, terror and joy surged through his veins. For a treacherous moment, he believed it had come to save him.
He nearly wept. Where did he get such audacity?
For he knew the angel had come to punish him.
Its face contorted, he could see the brows furrow, the glaring eyes, the tightened lips and the clenched jaw.
Its voice boomed through the ruined church.
“By thy choosing, the Earth was unmoored; Heaven turned its face away.”
Forgive me.
“This trespass outweighs all others, and mercy does not reach it.”
Forgive me.
“Thus, thy suffering is appointed, and its hour shall never pass.”
Forgive them, Father, for I have sinned.
The church did not answer.
The Heavens did not descend.
And Hell did not need to.
