Inventory

“agh”

“…ow.”
“Inventory. Eyes?”

He tried to open his eyes. They didn’t, and he cursed fluently at the pain.

“Hands?”

He reached up to touch his eyes, cursed again when his hands fell short with the sound of chain going taut.

“Legs are… legs are free.”

He twisted around, kicking out his legs, trying to hit something. Nothing. Nothing at all.

“Hell.”

The sound failed to echo. Not in a muffled sort of way, but in a the-sound-hasn’t-reached-something-to-reflect-off-of-yet kind of way. He yanked the chains on his hands really hard, and curled up in pain when the shock reached his eyes.

Curled up, he could reach his face. He passed one hand up, inspecting his lips, nose, eyes. Hand feels wet, tastes like blood. Gritted his teeth and gently probed around his eye sockets. Bruises, cuts, sockets are empty. He cursed again.

The lack of echo gave no comfort.

—-

After a time of just laying there, he followed the chains around his wrists to their anchor point. It felt like a normal iron bolt, but the ground felt like glass. Confused, he decided not doing anything for a while was a good idea, and did that.
~
“Come on. Up you get.”
“I’m fine here, really.”
“Isn’t that stone awfully cold?”
“The stone isn’t …what?“

His hands flew to the ground, fingers scrabbling, panic rising in his mind.

“You’re being silly.”
“You don’t exist.”

Calming himself, he carefully laid back and thought about it. If the ground turned to stone while he wasn’t paying attention… He carefully imagined the bolt not being there for a while, and then pulled gently at the chains. The chains didn’t resist.

He then carefully imagined the chains not being around his wrists. There was a clatter as they fell to the ground. He gathered them up, looping them about a wrist where they couldn’t go anywhere.

He then imagined his eyes as they used to be.

Nothing happened.

He swore.

—————-

“And now I walk until I hit something.”

The echo didn’t answer.

——————

He walked.

He walked for a long time, longer than he could remember, longer than he could count.

He lost count around 15000 steps. Twice.

He invented a new system of mathematics, and then discarded it in favour of constructing an entirely new concept based language.

He walked.

———————

He tried to sleep. Laid down, kept still, ran his on-mission downtime routine that makes him sleep under the worst conditions.

He couldn’t close his eyes.

————————

He tripped over the wall and landed with and uncoordinated thud. Swearing faintly, since being loud with no echo was just depressing, he sat up and leaned against the wall for a while. He decided that he and the wall would be come friends. The wall didn’t reply, much like the rest of this pathetic universe.

He followed the wall, dragging the chain across it and listening for irregularities, until his infinite patience got bored again.

There were no irregularities.

————————

Sitting on the wall, he carefully inspected his face with his hands. Getting unshaven, cuts and bruises healing. Getting hungry, too.

Eyes still gone.

He tried not to think about it, reached out through the air to reassure himself of his powers. Pressed his fingers carefully against the ruined sin along the bones of his eye sockets, and winced. Fingers didn’t smell bad, so no rot yet. Slowly, he put a finger into an empty socket to check the ruined flesh in there, and his body rebelled at his ticking a finger into and eye it thought was still there.

Quietly, “Blinking doesn’t work any more, you know that.” And touched the inside of his eye socket.

His entire body jerked, tearing his hand away, leaving him gasping and twitching slightly. He decided to let someone else inspect his eyes for him. Pending, of course, that he found someone.

——————

He reached into the aether and pulled out his lances, inspecting each one before laying it on the wall. His dragon knives followed, laid in a neatly crooked row next to the lances. Concentrating really hard, he stuck his arm all the way into the aether-pocket, rummaged around, and pulled out a sandwich.

Sniffing it carefully, he took a huge bite out of it. Taking a seat on the wall, he enjoyed the hell out of the rest of the sandwich.

It was the best damn sandwich he’d ever eaten.

—————

The breeze caught his attention first. It existed, and that was new. The scent on the breeze came next, and it smelled like town. Inland, agrarian town.

—————

He walked into town, adjusting path by the feel of the air and the faint click of his bootheels off the road. And listened to the whisper of his arrival spread down the street and the patter of children’s feet hiding from him. He wondered how bad he looked.

Fuckit.

“Would someone tell me where I may find a doctor?”

The sound of a circle gathering around him.

“Get out, demon.”

He spread his hands, a harmless gesture, “I have done nothing to hurt you.”

“We won’t have you infecting our doctor with your Darkness. Out.”

“I don’t carry the plague. All I need is someone to clean my wounds since I can’t do it myself.”

“You don’t carry the plague, you carry the Darkness, demon.”

“I can pay.”

He shrugged to himself. Anything they wanted, he could pay it.

“Get out.”

“Before I go, where did I come from? There is a lot of nothing out there.”

He could feel them staring before, but now it got alien and uncomfortable. He wished he had his cloak.

“There’s forest in every direction. You appeared at the western edge.”

He nodded.

“Thank you. I’ll be one my way, then.”

And he walked, the circle parting before him.

About fifteen minutes out, he decided that being blind is a lot worse when there are trees.

Clean

I lay the razor-knives, the bowl of isopropyl alcohol, the lighter out in front of me. I dip the blades in fire, and then isopropyl, and lay them down carefully. I carefully clean a spot on my arm, a few fingers by a few more.

Flesh pulled tight under my fingers, I pick up a blade and delicately press the blade to my arm, skin parting gracefully and without pain under the edge. I pull the flesh tight again, and pass the blade through the cut again. Again, and again. It hurts when I get down to opening up capillaries, the faintest dusting of blood. I stop.

Pull tight another section of flesh, and repeat.

Again.

And again.

It hurts now, the screaming agony abused flesh treated with poison.

The last wound made, I clean the blade, and put it down, inspecting the damage.

They’ll heal fine, and I will heal along with them. They don’t understand that the physicality of my pain only lets me give my own pain to something to let it heal. This heals me, doesn’t hurt me.

Echoes

They echo in my mind with every drop of blood I spill, with every bone I break. The voices of my first kill are alway with me. They’re one of the few things that survived my death.

The dirt, the grime, the raw blood splashed across me as I dug his throat out with my fingers. “Kill him! Kill him!”

They chant.

They echo.

And I do.

I have no choice, I am ordered, I am a loyal dog.

I am tired of it. The ghosts, the death, the orders to kill and kill gain. To kill so I may live this half-life.
I’m sick of it.

The kill is reflexive now- lunge, parry, kick and stab again, death on the air underfoot in had. Attack, and I will kill. Like this, and that. Death on my hands.

Step back, turn away, shed lances and cloak. Step into the embrace of my enemies.

I feel nothing.

Ash

I knew a girl once. Well, we were dating or something, but we barely knew each other. Anyway, we were going to find a quiet place to study a little and maybe screw around a lot.

I guess I was the second best thing to suicide that ever happened to her.

We knew a hall that was nice- rarely frequented, lots of nooks. When we got there, it was barricaded by a sprawling group study. They said we could join, but we walked through, wondering maybe another building. The girl manning the other end, just out of sight of the end we came in overheard and mentioned that all the buildings would be like this.

Faster than I could react, fast enough that her name died in my mouth, she drew the gun and shot the girl.

The report echoed loud enough that I thought me ears would bleed.

“Ash!”

She turned to look at me, a grin on her face.

“She’d never leave us alone. C’mon.”

She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me away, outside the building.

“Ash… that wasn’t necessary?”

She smiled gently at me, squeezed my hand and with a grace that will always flicker before my eyes, shot her own head off.

“ASH.”

I had failed. If I’d done a little more, any more, they’d both be alive. Tasked with keeping the calm and collected, the level, I had failed spectacularly in my mission. I could never fail this badly again. I couldn’t return home.

I clutched the gun from her fingers, cocked it and put it to my head. Deep breath, die on an oxygen high, the pull was too strong for me.

I was too weak.

I turned and put the shot into the embankment. Perfect shooting range. I put a neat line down it until the splash from one chipped a guy’s bumper, until I saw security mobilizing in my direction.

“Don’ worry, I’ll pay for it.” My laugh sounded sick in my own ears.

How long had it been? Five second? An hour? I took of running like I had everything to hide, running against the winds kicked up by the freak storms this place gets.

At the end of the ground, I stepped over the lip of the retaining wall and kept going, stepped up into the air and ran into the storm.

I guess the storm knew what I wanted. It sucked me up into itself and held me there, letting me tread air like water, waiting for it to build.

Ah, there, the air shifted and quickly- cock aimless fire- I fired up into the roiling mass of the storm. The returning bolt slammed me to the ground.

I’ll never fly again. I used to live to spend as much time as I could running, flying on the ground to hide my powers, but now they say I might be able to write and walk again someday.

I don’t deserve to speak.

Clamor

What we have here is the intersection of two worlds/universes, crushing inexorably together. Names splice and warp, words change meaning even as they are spoken, attributes and equips permute and proliferate.

You can’t stand against the perpetual change-clamor so you fall to it even as it rejects you through bad dreams and twisted thoughts.

We can’t understand this jumping between. The things we created are so much more faster better stronger powerful than us that we can’t even tag along like a kid on a leash, dragged along like a toy on a collar instead. We think they don’t either, that it’s all meta but they could just be pulling one over us.

I told you, I just can’t be like you.

The clamor rolls on, spilled noise from Macx’s suitcase and the music cartels washing away the dikes before them.

Not even the augments and uploads can deal with the crushing-clamor-change monster that has eaten everything we knew and shat it back without mercy or thought.

Bridge

Would anyone like a bridge? That is all.

Skin

I grip the children’s song in my black gloved fist, all blues and flowers bleeding out through the leather. It’s cruel and I can’t care. I watch the leather stretch across my knuckles but then revulsion and I throw the carcass from me, and the glove too, disseminating as it disappears through the air.

My mind stops in shock. It’s been so long since I’ve seen my flesh under the skin that I’m reeling. My claws extrude from the tips of my other glove as I prod my skin and the veins I can see. Lacerations, new scars heal instantly now.

Song that only I can hear floats through my aural-space and snaps my head up. I create a new glove to cover the mess of my hand and resume the hunt. The wind pulls me up and lets me seek, snaking sentient hair sensing forbidden joy in the air.

A scent only I can taste, not even I can resist, not even trained as I am to resist pain fear revulsion. Reulsion and my body convulses at what I’ve destroyed

without emotion. I vomit up my souls and die and am born again on the wind.

Rat-man

The kzzzing of the whips woke me this morning. My joints skitched and caught as I crawled out of the rat hole they keep me in. I don’t get my oils in there like I would in any other stadium, but this is the only place I would keep at. I watch the gladiators curling their whips around the others feet without ever touching. The match hasn’t started yet. I sit and dangle my feet over the edge of the benches, into my rat hole.

The keepers sanded the Floor today. They’re expecting blood, and lots of it. We don’t have playbills, not when I don’t get oil. I yell down to the whip wielders.

They snap their whips at me, the coils sparking as they touch themselves. Piss off ratman, piss off.

I throw stand-sand at them and their whips spark and flail as they try to keep it out of their eyes. They tell me it a whip day, a death day. Someone here, half of us are going to die. I already knew that, but it’s good to have confirmation.

Ack. I groan and fling myself off the benches to the pit below, landing fives legs down. Another groan as I run for the grates on the far side that lead to the burn and resuscitate vats below.

The drumbeat begins.

Delusions

My delusions create your universe.

or do they create mine? I know that your delusions and fantasies corrupt mine. I’m listening to them right now, the voices from stone, from my head, from the air around, from the pages bound.

Contorted and broken, staying isolated wouldn’t cure me of my delusions. I can control them if i don’t bother them.

Such good puppets, I croon. Even as I am jerked by my own strings.

Such good puppets.

Laughter

The creme smeared across her face burns in every opened pore. She smiles at the pain, pulling her face into a rictus parody of a smile as if to say, I will be beautiful too.

The mask of light spread over her eyes, falls across the window around her. She’s looking through the light at the blinding darkness before her.

She picks a doll up by its feet and snaps it like a bird breaking a worms back. The new limb configuration, bosom thrust out and legs splayed, is turned about in her hands. The doll is hung by its feet, crucified.

She pulls the knot tighter, watching her fingertip turn blue. The needle slides through flesh she can no longer feel, pulling wire through. Repeated lines of brass and blood. It will scar beautifully when she removes the wire.

She’s standing on the dam, arms outstretched, crucified. Gracefully she dives to the rocks below, splashing into the white waters.