The village was silent, cold, a blackened smudge against the shadowed plains. The laughing wind stirred clouds of dust, the small grains of sand tearing at the desolate houses with their staring window-eyes in a grim observement of the lifeless forms strewn before them. The stink was overwhelming, the sweet sweet smell of week-old sun-cooked meat and dried blood.
The absurdity of it all struck me as funny somehow.
The vultures circled overhead in the black-slate sky, their harsh talk grating my ears with songs of rotten flesh and maggots. Beside me, I can hear Jirasu stifling a retch, his countenance horrified as he observed the gate to the small fortress.
Embedded on the iron spears, was what once could have been a human being. Crucified, it was torn open from neck to belly, perching carrion feeders pecking at its intestines.
I shot a glance at Jirasu, silently reprimanding him. The foxman only turned his back on the scene, shaking his head so fiercely as if to toss the image of the carnage straight out of his brain.
He had much to learn, this young one, pulled from a slaughter his own village had suffered. He had to learn the ridiculousness of the living...
Leaving Kurabos to wait with Jirasu, I made my way into the village alone.
My fascination for wholesale murder was something I couldn't explain. Perhaps they were to strengthen my resolve that purification was needed to cleanse this world, that it was important to make restore Order. Or maybe it was a way to keep the memory of my kin's destruction alive, to brand it into my brain with a wicked, vengeful fire.
Kurabos, Jirasu, and I.... we all came from extinct lives...
Overhead, thunder rumbled low as I continued to slowly transverse through the empty streets of this once prosperous fortress, wondering at the lives that had so abruptly ended with some great, unexpected attack. Perhaps by monsters. Perhaps by other men. But the result is the same.
Death was fat with their souls, Its cold, greedy fingers sucking on the misery of it all.
Unconsciously, my pace began to quicken, as the sight of lives torn so violently from the bodies surrounded me, filled my vision. The stench was suffocating, I was suffocating...!!! Clutching my head I ran, my feet smacking down on the cobblestone street, echoing in beat with my heart as their accusing eyes from
--countless bodies, like a grotesque sea of black, blanketing the innocent snow, blood raining down upon them as more spiraled down to thud with a booming smash to the unforgiving earth below---
all around, the people of this place of darkness, asking me, why, why had this happened and I can only reply with a cry that tore from my lips as I continued to
--fight, fight with everything, as nothing matters now but vengeance, for they're all dead, dead, my family, friends, kin--
race between the buildings. The world twisted around me as my foot caught onto one of the corpses littering the street and I fell
--from the sky, the wicked javelins embedded in my skin sending sharp flares of pain spiking into my brain, and I cried out to the god I no longer believed in and cried out to my mother--
down into the stones with a smack that knocked the wind out of me. Lost in the memory of my own tragedy, I clawed at the gravel in a mad attempt to escape the ghosts of the past, reaching out to a corpse before me, thinking it was my mother, only to find that it was warm beneath the cloth, beneath my fingers, and it moved, the head lifting up at the ground to stare at me......
My struggles slowed, and I stared back into the dispassionate green eyes of a young boy, whose grey, wan face seemed to give no reaction or emotion to my appearance.
He looked like the dead around us....
A soft exhalation escaped from his parted lips and the boy lay his head back down on the cold stone, staring into nothingness.
I released his arm, incredulous, pushing myself up to my knees as I gained back the vestiges of my sanity. Moved by some foreign, powerful emotion, I reached out to the boy, lightly touching his shoulder, wondering how much of his mind was destroyed by the genocide of his home....
He did not register to my touch, only continuing to stare at the world with empty eyes the color of jade.
I was suddenly reminded of another boy, sitting alone in the midst of the corpses of his people....
"Oi," I whispered, again poking his shoulder, much harder this time.
His eyes moved at the sound of my voice, peering at me with a detached sort of curiosity, as if I was a strange, unwanted object that protruded in his dreamworld.
Crawling up next to him, I tried to smile reassuringly. "What is yer name?" I asked quietly, determined to break through his shell, draw him out.
He stared at me for the longest time, eyes unreadable, apathetic. Finally, he sat up limply, as if he had no bones, slumping down. His arm began to twitch and a sharp, rhythmic clacking rebounded through the empty plains. In his fist, the two hard spheres of crimson swung on their strings and smashed into each other.
The sound seemed to soothe him, for his eyes drooped and his body tilted to the side. Moving quickly, I caught his slight form in my arms, my heart wrenching as I witnessed what I could have become.
The arm slowed and the clacker-toy fell still. He buried his filthy face in my neck, frail body shuddering in silent sobs.
I don't know how long I held him as he cried. The rain overhead had begun, a cold drizzle that coated everything with a dull, dismal aura, shielding the miserable sight with its clean sheet of melancholy.
When the rain started to fall in heavy drops did the boy sigh a final time, a susurration begging for his mother, a plea ignored by indifferent gods in their accursed high thrones, drinking their ambrosia, and laughing at the mortality of men.
Just as they ignored a similar plea uttered by a boy so many many years ago...
Jirasu and Kurabos finally came inside the village to search for me, finding me sitting in a cold puddle, cradling the tiny boy, one cheek resting on his matted hair, rocking back and forth. They stood in solemn, mournful silence behind me, not knowing how to react.
I finally stood, my bones aching from the wet rain, lifting the body in my arms, smiling wistfully down at the face touched by the tranquility of death. His body was already stiff, and in his grip, he clutched his clacker-toy with a childish possessiveness that nearly made me laugh. Tears fell instead.