🌿Bramble Hawthorne🌿
^{The Broken Thorn}

Background

Personality

Twisted Thorns

“It’s not power coursing through me, it’s rot.”Bramble wasn’t quite stumbling as much as he was simply letting gravity drag him forward like a corpse refusing to lie down. Every few steps his shoulder would hit the wall, leaving behind smears of blood that glistened in the dimly lantern lit hall. It happened to be a rare night with a room of his own, and he collapses into it, shoving the door shut by leaning his full weight against it. The rough wood scraped his torn skin, pulling a strained wince from him.He stays there with his spine pressed to the door, breath rattling out of him like a wind chime made of broken bones. The lone lantern on the bedside table flickered, not from a draft, but seemingly from unease, as though the flame was recoiling at the sight of him. He lifts his hand to wipe his face and leaves behind a fresh streak of red on his jaw, painting over blossoming bruises. His hand trembled. His whole body trembled.The curse pulsed.Like an iron hot spike, pain lanced beneath his rips, sharp enough to force a choked sound from his weakened throat. Bramble chokes on a broken sound as his knees buckle and send him sliding down the door until he sits half collapsed on the dusty floorboards. He swallows one. Twince. Bracing himself for the next wave, because it always comes.“Please…just let me rest.” he muttered to the empty room. Or maybe, he spoke to the curse. Maybe to the gods who had long since turned their gaze from him.His tired gaze finds the bed. Only a few feet away, but somehow those few feet feels like the entire length of the jungle he once called home. Still, he forces himself upright, one hand scraping the wall for balance. The first step is progress. The second unleashes an agony that crackles through every nerve like lightning. Bramble hisses and grabs for the nightstand to steady himself. The movement topples over a bottle, some cheap herbal tonic bought from curiosity, and shatters it on the floor. A bitter, useless scent fills the air.He ignores it. Remedies were a lie he stopped believing in long ago.𓆱𓆮𓆱Finally he drags himself onto the bed, collapsing onto the thin mattress. The rusty springs groan beneath him, jutting through the scratchy fabric in some places, but rust was nothing compared to the wounds already covering him. He doesn’t bother stripping, cleaning, or tending to anything. He simply closes his eyes.“I am hungry, little thornling.”Bramble jolts awake, eyes open in a split moment. “No…no, no, no….I just fucking fed you!” he screams, sitting straight up in his bed. Something felt incredibly wrong, something missing from his actions. Pain. Where was the pain? He raises his arms to inspect them, shaking, and he feels his stomach drop at the lack of blood on them. In fact, there was no sign of recent injury at all, just old scars and blemishes.The lantern at his bedside table flickers before it extinguishes completely, leaving the room cast in cold soft moonlight from the singular window with shadows of gnarled tree branches cutting through the light. A sound begins coming from the window, subtle at first, like tree branches scrapping the glass, but not quite right. It sounded more like the branches were cutting through the glass, sawing and piercing, shrill and building. Bramble plasters his long ears to his head and holds his hands over them tightly trying to drown out the sound, but it still cuts through. “Shut up. Just shut up. I fed you, I know I fed you. Stop. Shut up.”“I’m hungry, little thornling.”“I said shut up!” Bramble yells out as he leaps from his bed. There were no herbal tonics on the bedside table, no smell of spilled remedies filling the room. Instead, it was stacked with bottles of spirits, most of them empty, poison to neutralize poison. He grabs one of those bottles and hurls it across the room at the window. Glass shatters across the floor, covering it in glimmering shards, but the scraping sound still persists, now amplified into a sickened hell chorus through all the broken shards.He never gives his feet permission to move, and yet Bramble finds himself walking across the room towards the broken window. Stumbling through the singing shards, he finds himself with his back against the wall once more, his ears catching the chill of the breeze through the open window frame, the outside city sounds drowned by the screech of scraping razors on glass. Shaking, he slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the ground, reaching for the largest shard beside him with trembling hands.𓆱𓆮𓆱In the clear wedge of glass, Bramble could see pieces of himself, a jagged mosaic of a life carved out by pain. Endless suffering. Endless loneliness. Reflected back in prefect, crystalline clarity. And it was beautiful. Pure. Honest. It was life in pure color without the cloudy filters of family, morals, love.“I’m hungry”
“I’m hungry”
“I’m hungry”
“I’M HUNGRY”It was dark. His eyes are closed, though he doesn’t remember closing them, but most importantly, it was quiet. The scraping hell chorus was gone, replaced by nothing more than the distant hustle and bustle of the city and his own ragged overworked breath. Slowly, he opens his eyes, and is greeted by that same shard of glass now halfway embedded into his thigh. His hand was still wrapped around it, bleeding profusely, sliced deep from where it slid against those razor sharp edges. It hurt. The pain was throbbing and he was bleeding for more than he should be, but it was quiet. For the first time in what felt like his whole existence since this curse took hold of him, it was quiet. Bramble takes a deep clearing breath and lets his head fall back against the wall, eyes closing as he lets his shoulders slump and relax. Quiet. Quiet at last….At last…..“I’m hungry, little thornling.”