Fictober 2022 | Day 9 | Deep Water Prompt #2618

Photo by Lenstravelier on Unsplash

❝The Archers are a mystery, carrying no arrows, and drawing empty bows. They say begging is useless, if one takes aim at you.❞

Some strike you dead, immediately. Some strike you with pestilence, others misery and malaise, still others with mad laughter that will not cease until you are breathless and weeping and wailing with the pain of it.

The worst, though, are the ones that strike you with obsession.

Oh, some call it love, those who are luckier or more foolish, but I know better. 

I have seen those afflicted become raving, ravaging beasts, consumed with the desire to consume. They do not calm or cease once they have caught whomever the Archers have deemed their prey. No, they take and they rend, they eat, they break.

And only then is their need satiated, and they come back to themselves horrified, if they come back to themselves at all, covered in blood and viscera, death in their bellies, their teeth, their hands.

They say begging is useless, and that is true.

But flattery is not.

So we name the Archers gods. We worship them as though we feel more for them than fear and loathing. We give them beautiful names, and craft for them beautiful visages, and hallow for them beautiful temples.

And we hope we can satiate their desire to hunt, if we sacrifice one of our own to them every dark of the moon.

Fictober is a challenge where writers respond to a prompt a day for the whole of October.
This year's prompts are from Deep Water Prompts on tumblr.