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˖⌗﹒For Me| "Et in Arcadia, Ego"
by CAVE CANEM
Horror Buff
a month ago
still one of my favorite pieces of Claw.
art by eldritch-liminal-entity // eldritch_rat on Artfight
Claw is mine.
_____________________________________________________________
art by eldritch-liminal-entity // eldritch_rat on Artfight
Claw is mine.
_____________________________________________________________
Even in Arcadia
The ash rained and twirled in an ominous, crackling dance from the glowing, desolate blaze that continued to engulf and devour the rubble and debris of a formerly inhabited village. Claw stood before the smoldering ruins. His shoulders were slumped, wounds, both new and old littered his heavily worn silhouette. His eyes, however, burned with a blazing fire, far more violent and not yet spent.
“You think…you think this was madness? This-this was a mercy. The fire was the only honest thing I’ve ever known. It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t pretend to love. It devours, just like they did.”
“Every soul that I’ve ever let near me …carved their names into my skin with rusted, tainted blades and left me to bleed into the chapters they left me abandoned and to close alone where I started. Do you know what that feels like? To be written in the blood of your own trust?”
“I watched them, one by one, turn their backs, take their pieces of me, and vanish like a thin fog. Lovers…kin….friends…none stayed. They left…marks, not memories. And every time I tried to forget, something inside me would howl…enraged and pained…but not the beast. No, that beast learned to be silent. It was the remnant of the broken man that screamed.”
He paused for a moment, swallowing hard on dry, painful chokes. His gaze remained on the fire. He wiped his nose and muzzle with the sleeve of his blouse. He continued after a heavy sigh.
“I gave them chances. Gods forgive me, I gave them hope. But they came back, with echoes of warning in my mind, only to remind me that I’m not made for peace. That even when I smile, something beneath my skin itches, twitching, waiting, remembering…So, I burned it. The houses, the prayers, the promises. The empty, desolate promises. I burned the laughter I never trusted, the faces that wore masks of kindness, the voices that said home, but meant trap.”
“I cleansed it. Because no past worth keeping ever looked back at me with anything but a knife behind its teeth. Now, all that’s left is smoke… and silence. And I can finally hear myself breathe.”
He glanced up from his audible thoughts, whispering, his voice almost absent and without any feeling left to echo or describe any sign or give a hint of the emotions that welled within him.
“Et in Arcadia ego.”
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Artwork (Digital)
General Furry Art
Werewolf / Lycanthrope
1852 x 1989
3.18 MB
