Psychology of "The Selfish Rock"

[dominantdrowess]

Around my mother's fungus farm, there used to be a long fence that boxed it off from the rest of the city's fungus caverns. Every few posts, there was a skull. Human. Drow. Orc. Goblin. Mounted on a post. Early in my life, it became my responsibility to mount these severed heads on the edge of our land, and later on? It became my responsibility to sever those heads. I remember the first time my mother killed a drow, severed the head... and had me mount it on the fence. I was fifty-four.

It was my mother's patron. My father. He had been a wizard, an enchanter. Someone valuable to her. Someone who had been valuable to me. He used to mind-control the slaves and make them dance like toys and my sister and I would laugh. My mother had stabbed him, then used an ax to remove the head. I hadn't been there when it had happened ... but when I entered the house, returning from the field, she directed me to mount the head.

I did what I was told. But? It made me feel uneasy. It was the first time, early in my life that I came to conceptualize the fact that my head -- even a females -- could be mounted on a fence. Mounting his head ... alongside all those other skulls that I had known to be slave races -- mere animals -- had made me feel ill. I remember throwing up on my way back to the house. I never told my mother. I never even asked what his crime had been, or asked if there had even been a crime.

I had always feared my mother. But passing that skull, on the corner of the yard on my way to the main path back toward the marketplace always reminded me of that fear. The understanding that my skull could be like all those on the fence. To this day, seeing skulls mounted on pikes reminds me of my mother.

There's a painting, inside House Xun'viir, on the wall. A dark, ominous painting that almost moves. A painting where you can't really see what it is until you stare for long enough. A painting of magical darkness. It is called 'The Abyss'. I don't know what others see in it; I know it's magical ... tainted by some fey-spell cast upon it by that mad artist Shynndra Xun'viir ... but when I looked into that picture for a few minutes? I realized I was looking up into the darkness and saw my mother handing my father's severed head down to me as it had been hundreds of years ago, in perfect and vivid detail ... and I vomited only moments after departing the house, right near the front door of the hub.

Shynndra, the artist, killed herself, only a few short years after showing me that painting ... and I never asked her about it. She was painting a canvas red with blood from her own slit wrist... a painting she never completed, passing out from blood-loss and bled out on the floor before the canvas, as if some sudden madness had taken her. She had always been crazed: I was not surprised when I heard about her death.

- Saslae Xun'viir

[kiljaedon]

Well written story. Has a mysterious vibe and world building feel to it