Chapter 484
The small Spanish town of Almendro nestled among rolling hills, its terracotta roofs baking under the relentless sun. Life moved with the gentle predictability of the changing seasons. Until it didn't.
Rocokala, a girl of seventeen, was unremarkable, a face in the crowd, unnoticed and forgettable until the night she found herself at the wrong end of a cockroach's mandibles. It happened in the musty storeroom behind her uncle's bakery.
She had been searching for a dropped coin, her fingers reaching into the shadows, when something small, chitinous, and wholly unpleasant scuttled over her hand. It sank its jaws into her skin.
She recoiled with a cry of disgust, slapping at her hand, watching as a bloated cockroach tumbled to the dusty floor and writhed its last moments. The bite stung, more like an acidic burn, but she brushed it off as nothing but another dreadful memory.
The following day, the town felt different to her. The air itself seemed to vibrate with an unseen energy, the distant clamor of cicadas turned into a menacing drone.
She noticed she could hear a faint scraping beneath the floorboards, a skittering sound that no one else appeared to notice. When her uncle bellowed an instruction, it sounded to Rocokala, strangely distant as if coming from the other side of a wall.
A subtle tingle moved beneath her skin. Rocokala looked at her reflection.
She was the same girl with tired brown eyes but different at the same time, more vivid, edges sharpened, more intent, somehow predatory. Later that morning while working at her uncles bakery she dropped a large tray of sugar cookies when another tremor moved beneath her skin.
She quickly bent to pick the mess up, and noticed a long line of ants advancing to a small sticky drop of sugar on the tiled floor, it looked as if a whole legion of tiny footmen, eager to please her command. They swarmed around her, as if anticipating her desires, or so she felt.
"Rocokala, niña, are you daydreaming again?" Her uncle barked.
Rocokala's stare became sharper, her mouth curved into something that almost looked like a smile, though a very unnatural one. Her words were not of this place and did not belong to her anymore, "Of course, Tio, just thinking how the little ones adore sugar"
Her voice held a note of detachment. The bite had changed her, altering her at a base, fundamental level, she just didn't fully know it yet.
As days moved forward, the changes deepened, her senses amplified. The sounds of the town felt like a constant onslaught and the constant flow of chatter seemed unnecessary and childish to her.
She saw them for what they were. The villagers and how simple their needs and lives were, predictable.
Her anger began to build. The creatures of the night, once hidden, seemed drawn to her, scuttling out of the darkened alleys and shadowed spaces, beetles, centipedes, all of them forming what felt to Rocokala as a symphony, hers.
With each passing night, her mind warped, and her sense of empathy evaporated. What had once been minor annoyance to the cockroach bite now became a gnawing need, she found herself craving a different way, one where she controlled, a different kind of song.
A twisted, dark anthem that seemed to echo deep within the deepest parts of the earth. She experimented with her strange ability in the abandoned lot on the edge of the town where, late at night she would watch the stars from a decaying structure she found herself fond of.
With focused intensity she imagined herself being accompanied by them and watched, astounded as she watched legions of crawling insects surge from the dirt, they swarmed at her bidding, forming crude shapes at her commands and disappearing once they no longer pleased her. Her eyes shined with an intense and unholy fire, a cruel sort of curiosity.
Rocokala now saw her town as an ant hill, its small townsfolk its workers, ready to serve her every need and whims. She felt an unnerving satisfaction grow inside.
The thought of dominion was becoming intoxicating to her. The first oddity was her uncle.
His hand that often held his baker's shovel seemed shaky when she delivered her message through the dark swarm she sent him when he was about to yell at her. The sight was so brief but so poignant to Rocokala, that she quickly retracted her swarm, and looked him in the eye.
Her gaze seemed intense, with a purpose of their own, as they saw the frail man falter with fear. It filled her heart with dark delight.
By the time the village started asking questions, it was already too late. Her once cheerful neighbor, now barely able to meet the her eyes as she asked about his well being had been found to have strange markings on his body as he walked around as a walking mannequin the townsfolk tried so desperately to help.
Yet her command, through the insect kingdom had him firmly, hers, her eyes glinted, as she dismissed the village as something beneath her. "They are merely tools for me to play with, toys." she thought.
They were not individuals anymore. Then came the missing animals, starting with the stray cats.
At first the townsfolk had merely passed it off as nothing more than something, common. Now, as people, dogs, the elderly, slowly disappeared, panic started to erupt.
Then, the livestock, found mangled, with peculiar bites and strange, ant like patterns carved upon their hides, became to feel that there was more that meets the eye. She reveled in their fear, in the escalating panic and confusion, relishing her control as she moved the townsfolk in a carefully calculated plan to have what was theirs, be hers now.
The village priest was next, her hand made a slow, precise pattern as she lifted him into the dark air with spiders forming the intricate tendrils and shapes around the frail body of the man of faith, she whispered words of power over him, words only the lowest of the low would ever understand. His cries soon muted, turning into guttural gasps.
Rocokala now saw herself as the sovereign, her eyes alight, walking amidst them all in all her wicked glory as if made from darkness itself. Her actions, previously constrained by societal rules and expectations, found their new freedom through her reign.
It all was becoming easier, a game. And it was time for the final act of her grand play.
She gathered the town in the town square, the surviving souls standing before her in trepidation, insects forming a massive crawling throne behind her as she appeared as nothing short of demonic before their scared eyes. "I offered you simple pleasures, a world to live within"
She started, her voice an unnerving symphony as she stared out into the faces that used to be familiar. They were no longer to her now. "But you proved to be incapable of following instructions"
Rocokala slowly turned as if to address another audience of hers, behind, and said "Now it is time for your world to burn". Her insects surged, forming waves of moving creatures engulfing everything, people began screaming.
As she enjoyed the destruction, a woman screamed out "Eres un monstruo!" ("You're a monster!") and Rocokala stared with curiosity at this very human woman who dared spoke up before turning into her, her dark throne had been growing steadily through the swarm of insects as if becoming another living organism as she now grew claws out from her nails.
She noticed dark exoskeletal ridges developing along her bones. A macabre form had fully transformed before all to see.
A thing of beauty in Rocokala's newly formed perception. The few remaining survivors ran, or so she let them believe, because what good would running do in a world such as this now.
A dark feeling of accomplishment began to sink as she felt the last drops of whatever remained within her die. Now a twisted ruler was all she could be, or ever become.
She felt that now that everything that stood on her path of domination was dealt with, the true work of expanding her world had begun. It felt perfect.
But out of the smoke, from an old store, emerged the quiet elderly man that everyone had assumed had demised as he limped towards her, moving unnaturally in steps of some strange rhythm. The old man reached into his pocket as he made eye contact with Rocokala, an eerily cold, knowing one.
"Ven, niña, el tiempo de juego se acabó." (Come, little girl, playtime is over.") he produced from the interior of his cloak, an ornate metal hand with very strange shapes etched upon each metal finger, she laughed, as nothing would harm her anymore.
It seemed very insignificant, but to him, his eyes showed something very powerful. He threw it into the ground before her feet as her entire army of crawling creatures that had become her began to react violently against her, the ground seemed to be tearing apart under her new insect claws.
"What- What have you done?!" she yelled. Her throat tightened, her legs were stuck in what began to turn into solid earth, moving slowly from under her and towards above as to cover all of her being.
She screamed in frustration as she tried moving her hand but her skin began peeling as they touched the stone. Her mouth began filling with earth.
She fell in darkness as her kingdom collapsed. The world closed.
Rocokala demised as it would seem the roaches were no match for old, magical stone, or an elderly townsman. The stone sealed her form completely as her evil went into what would remain of her form.
Buried as another sad forgotten chapter in this world. Her dark ambitions entombed with her, leaving only an ungodly rock sitting on top of a small hole on an empty, deserted, small Spanish town.