Post by HCM Brain Candy on Aug 16, 2010 16:53:11 GMT -6
It was bright, bright beyond comparison or comprehension. Everywhere his eyes cast their gaze it was blinding light. No place was untouched, yet somehow this did not blind him or impair his ability to see in any way; his vision was clear.
“THE ACCUSED WILL STEP FORWARD.”
The voice was not something to be defied; it was law. It was That which Was. He stepped forward as it commanded.
He stood before a great throne, glistening with alabaster and the finest gems, outshining the sun in its radiance. He couldn’t look upon the source of the Voice; there were several times that he tried, but each time he was forced to turn away lest his eyes be burned in their sockets. Instead, his eyes settled elsewhere. Only the foot of the throne was visible, encrusted with gold and jewels. And of course, there was the only other being nearby, standing next to the throne on his left.
She stood there, dressed in clothes that did not seem out of place on a six year old American girl, though they seemed as rags in their filth, covered in dirt and grime. Yet despite her frumpy appearance, there was a strange authority in her stance; a clout, an influence that belied her sullied exterior.
She was the one who would speak against him. Peter’s knees buckled on the spot, weighted down under a nauseating wave of one emotion in particular, one that seeped into his bones and soured his belly. She would be the witness against him. She would deliver the testimony.
She would be the one who spoke the truth.
“THE WITNESS WILL SPEAK HER TESTIMONY.”
Dread cast its pall over him, squeezing all hope and comfort from him like a wet rag being strung dry. Words came to his mind; he wanted to assure her, console her. He wanted to make things better, wanted to fix what had gone wrong.
He wanted to tell her was sorry.
But as his ever sickening stomach told him, as the crushing weight on his shoulders bore him down with, as every fiber of his being screamed to him, it wasn’t…
Angel stood as from nowhere a pure white cloth was placed on her shoulders, covering her dirtied, shredded rags. With aching deliberation, the six year old raised her head, though her eyes steadfastly focused downward, seemingly unwilling to cast their gaze up to meet her eldest brother. It was all he could do to keep from burying his head in shame; he could not fathom looking into her eyes... and seeing. But guilt and morbid curiosity held his face forward, though in the process sapping every ounce of strength he had left.
At long last, however, the pitiful creature raised her eyes, and for one moment their gazes locked, and what Peter saw tore into his gut and eviscerated his soul.
She was afraid.
Of him.
Peter gasped in shame and horror and would have collapsed on the spot were it not for the iron shackles that held aloft his arms; thus he sagged, the screaming clangs of the metal chains preventing him from falling into a sprawled out slumber of fatigue and shame. Instead he dangled like some hunk of meat, or like a Roman convict undergoing crucifixion, left in the open for all to see and mock.
No mockers came. Instead they came.
“See!” came the horrible raspy declaration. “See what a wretched thing he is!”
“Yes,” came another, “The smell of treachery is upon this one.”
“See!” came yet another, “This one is the Betrayer.”
The overwhelming brightness of his surroundings subsided, though the throne remained as bright and clear as ever. From the edges came a creeping darkness, a suffocating pall that encroached upon him like a creeping wave of noxious fumes. The demons began entering his sight.
Like dark whispers they came, creeping upon him and slowly chattering amongst themselves, a harsh murmur sounding like the gnashing of teeth. Their demonic forms hunched over and exuded darkness, standing in stark contrast to their hideously glowing eyes, burning a monstrous orange.
And they slowly began their demonic Chorus.
“Sinner.”
“Liar.”
“Selfish one!”
They swarmed him from all sides like a throng of hecklers, soon numbering in the dozens, staring at him like some spectacle, some portent. Slowly, a whisper took shape midst their throng.
It was a quiet thing, less a sound in and of itself but more of an echo, an insubstantial resonance that found its way into the recesses of his heart, reverberating through and striking the darker corners. A bone shattering shrill screamed out; Peter’s attempts to cover his ears were broken as his binding chains halted his hands midair.
“See!”
“See!”
Like the air-scorched aftermath of a bomb the echo stopped, but all did not become quiet. Instead, the ugly screeching notes that began slowly deep within grew and began to blossom, echoing and spreading outwards. The demons’ eyes lit as if a fire spread amongst them, a quiet rabidity that inundated life from the surroundings.
In their eyes was the look of fellowship; they had found one of their own kind.
“See!”
Screaming, he struggled against his chains, desperately trying to summon the will to break free. Energy and resolve he suddenly found in quantity, but the irons binding him were unbending and uncompromising, doing nothing but hold him in place and mar his flesh. As he fought in vain to free himself, he felt the screeching spread, ringing and shrilling and casting all else aside. It forced itself to the fore of his mind, drowning all else. Soon he felt it reverberate all the way to his chains.
The irons binding him shook with the screeching, so much so they grew infused with it causing them to glow, glowing a searing white hot. And, as all white hot things do once they reach a breaking point, it began to melt. It began to burn and singe into his skin, melting into him like a cream or lotion, though the absorption was far less pleasant. It burned through, painfully working its way into his blood and hitchhiking back into his heart. And here, it touched the dark corner that was screeching.
And with that the Chorus began in earnest, all the while as Angel watched.
Fuming, burning acid filled his body, scouring every cell, every corner within, ripping it all aside and making way for what was to come, a reflection of what already was. Here it came, here it was; he was showing his true colors, and yet all he could do was stare with pleading and shame at his terrified sister. She stared back, unable to break the lock, her soft blue eyes wide and running with tears. Peter started to shed tears of his own, but these quickly gave way to streams and droplets of acid, searing and etching his cheeks and eyes.
Stumbling back and screaming, Peter clutched at his face as the screeching chorus pricked and pierced his skin, searing it and cracking it as it withered into a dry husk, disfiguring and deforming it. It was as if his skin were molting ashes, a shedding of skin brought on by acid and fire. Clenching his teeth, he struggled to breathe as his lungs were sent into spasms.
A snap, a cracking of stone sounded out and Peter belatedly realized his right index finger felt as though it had been dipped in napalm. He didn’t want to look, nothing in him did, but the fear was more powerful than the shock. His gaze turned and his eyes fixed upon a dark, sharp, protrusion on the tip of his finger.
He stumbled back for breath in denial, eyes snared at his claw as if by taut chains. “...O... Oh no...” his rattled, rasping voice whispered.
Another pain struck; a squirming, wrenching spurt in his lower vertebra that soon launched itself violently. Snapping around in anguish and surprise, he found a short but growing fleshy appendage growing outwards in grotesque, violent bursts. All the while, the Chorus had morphed from a screech to a scream, pounding against him from within and ever forcing its alteration to his body forward.
“Please... Please no...”
“See!” the demons hissed, “See, join.”
“Join,” another repeated.
“Join!”
One of the devils charged at him, gripping and holding his arm, to be followed by a plethora of his fellows who congregated around him, hissing and chanting, adding to the shrill screaming of the Chorus, an unholy cacophony that burst his body and sent him reeling.
The Chorus commanded, and his bones shuddered and lurched, shoving and shifting the flesh around them which conformed unevenly and out of step, wrenching and twisting his tissue with the most extreme of callousness.
The demons pressed in from all sides, squeezing his agonized form so much that the distinction between them was becoming less and less. He could feel them, not just their bodies but their essences as they were carried by the Chorus, attracted by the devilish cacophony emanating from within him, weaving and entwining themselves into it. Their eternal rot and wickedness flowed freely within, bringing to the open what once before existed only within the ugly shadows that he never spoke of or acknowledged.
It was the Chorus of Lies; betrayal and hatred hung thick in the air as Peter exhaled in his wheezing and screaming.
The assembly surrounding him hissed in excitement, now less a gaggle of dark Minions than a cloud of pure darkness, consisting of droplets of condensed evil. His labored breathing stirred it like a swarm of wasps; it congregated around him, positioning itself right where he would breathe it in. He tried not to breathe, but his constant agony and continuous pains made abstaining impossible. It seeped into his flesh, squirming its way inside him like a pack of hungry worms. It dug into his tissue and mingled with his blood. That which he couldn’t help but breathe in dashed for his lungs as a parasite looking for a nest within his gut, to makes its home there.
A forceful cascade of drums punched through his back, mangling his skeleton and forcing the bones to branch outward, piercing muscle, nerves, and skin, skin that by now was little more than flaking ashes. Suddenly with a great heave his skin rippled and quaked, shaking and falling off in crumbling chunks and scattering in a blinding cloud of dust.
He screamed an unearthly howl as his vocal cords rasped, disintegrated and reshaped themselves, forcing him to cough on their ashes as they fell down his throat. Still, there was only one thing that truly held his attention, one thing that mattered. “An-“ he hacked and wheezed as the churning wracked and melted pieces of his flesh. “Ang-Angel... Please,” his shattered remnants of a voice rasped out. “Please...”
A cascading wave of screeching pummeled through his skull, warping and distorting it; with cracks and the creaking of bone it snapped its way forward. The Chorus’s resonating shattered his teeth like glass, leaving broken remnants that were pounded out by the sharp tearing instruments that stabbed their way through his gums, the teeth of a flesh rending predator.
As his body convulsed and was wracked by the thundering drumbeats, his skin cracked and fell to pieces like an ancient statue left under the constant erosion of acidic rain. His face split open like a broken mask, exploding like a hot light bulb with water thrown onto it; with an ear piercing shatter it splintered into a thousand pieces, the façade shattering forever. Breaking into dust it swirled around him in a black maelstrom that obscured his sight; the dust grew so oppressively thick he could not get a clear breath without choking and coughing as each breath brought another lungful of grime and ashes. His face, now free of the mask heaved forward like a cloud of nerve gas released from its canister; his shifting skull violently pressing itself onward to show its naked form to the world, a thing of blackness and deceit.
Gasps of horror ushered and Angel recoiled, crawling away on her back, her legs quaking too much for her to stand. Even midst his agony, as his vision blurred and shifted, dust swirled everywhere, and his body warped from its humanity, he saw her clear as day. “Angel... P...” he stopped and clenched his shifting teeth and his hands of bone, twisted flesh and ashes, “Please, I didn’t mean...”
An explosion the likes of Mt. Vesuvius erupted in his back, accompanied by a hammer of pain that knocked the wind out of him, decking him in a face-plant to the ground. His distorting face, rapidly forming into a snout, pushed his head back, forcing it off the ground as his snout grew longer and larger and craning his neck at an odd angle. Immediately bones shot through his back, spiking and radiating outward like a flower, blossoming midst the maelstrom of dust into an array of dark flesh. Thick membranes grew and dangled from them, hanging like hides from freshly slaughtered animals.
His lower spine punctured ever outward into a tail, curling around itself as the nerves and muscles fought like rabid dogs to assert themselves. Mass added itself from nowhere, weighing him down with more and more draconic flesh, leaving him struggling to breathe as his muscles fought to catch up with the rest of the growth. His hips twisted and asserted new shapes, his legs reassembled themselves with a deafening roar, soon they too grew to reflect the Chorus’s dark, twisted design.
Soon there was but one last thing that remained definitely human. Peter focused all his desperate, scrambling will to stare at his sister, to show her that he was still here as she knew him, to show her before...
It was too late. An ashen wind pierced his eyes, darkening and dissolving them, casting aside the old discarded flesh that now crumbled into ashes and dispersed itself into the dust storm. His agonized screams which sounded less and less human could not drown out the Chorus as it exacted its work, forging its own eyes for him, the red, slit-pupiled eyes of a demon.
There was no single thing left to identify this mass of darkness and ashes as a human being, nothing except a vague shape that was merely a ghostly echo of what once was; that and a screaming imprisoned presence within that beat with futile maddened despair against its cage, a mind that despite everything that remained all too human.
His hideous, malformed body now shaped itself quickly with the prodding of the cloud of darkness, and his massive hellish form, that which existed before only as an echo in the dark secret corners of his being, was becoming reality.
Now the Chorus resounded further, and as it reverberated through him a covering of rusted red scales at last began to cover his body, wrapping him and sealing the darkness within him. His vocal chords at last aligned, and with the end of his metamorphosis the Chorus reached it massive, terrifying crescendo. He had no choice but to add his own voice to it, a hellish, inhuman roar that shook the heavens around him, trembling the world just as it wracked his own being. A scream of agony and grief, it sounded of a great and terrible beast with the heart of nothing more than a pitiful, wretched, selfish human being.
Having reached its thunderous climax, the Chorus died down and quieted. But it didn’t disappear entirely; Peter was still breathing.
With fear and trembling, Peter attempted to steady himself and slow his breathing. The pain, at least, was gone. But his entire body felt wrong. And as he opened his eyes, he saw things humans were never meant to see. He saw his sister less as he saw her before, her soft, peach skin outshone by the heat radiating off her; her tender, innocent face a burning image of searing infrared. His stomach heaved at how his own eyes were doing this.
Angel, having seen this revelation and his eyes having been opened, had fallen on her back, overwhelmed with indescribable fear, too petrified even to cry. Her eyes were locked on him, this thing that she had thought had been her loving, older brother.
“Angel,” he whispered frantically, scrambling to for the words. “I-I... I’m so sorry,” was the only pathetic answer he could give. Her face remained a contorted mask of terror, the lines of which so deeply etched that she would never know a smile again.
“THE WITNESS HAS SPOKEN HER TESTIMONY,” the Voice returned, followed by a long, unbroken silence. The dragon that called itself Peter stood apprehensively, attempting to control his breathing and trying his utmost not to break down weeping on the spot.
“THE CULPABILITY OF THE ACCUSED IS DECIDED.” A further pause sent Peter’s heart racing uncontrollably.
“GUILTY.”
He had known in his mind that such would be the verdict with an almost absolute certainty. This did nothing to prepare him for the weight of that one word. It slammed into him, crashing into him like a ton of bricks, like a mountain, taking away every last piece of hope and shattering it like glass. His lungs seized and his throat constricted, his face froze and his blood turned to ice.
Searching for something, anything to grasp onto, he turned to his sister, panic and desperation covering his face. “Angel please. Please! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I never wanted...”
His sister did not respond, only standing up trembling as a strange glowing hand appeared holding something that was extended for her to take. “Please! I never meant for any of this to happen!”
She took the implement as it was offered to her.
“I’m sorry! Angel! Angel!!” he screamed in desperate sobs, his voice becoming choked with tears.
Her finger found a switch on the object, turning it on. The flashlight erupted on with an unnatural fury, cleaving the universe around them and able to smash the mightiest of mountains.
And then she pointed it at him.
The light blasted, seared, cut into him like millions of tiny knives, pounding him, thrashing him, throwing him into writhing torment. His pleas were drowned as nothing but deafened screams could escape his mouth. The light blasted away the ground, pelting and pummeling him with debris. He sank his hideous draconic claws down to find a foothold, but everything he scrambled to find gave way to the light’s terrible power.
A cascade of raw cosmic energy had been unleashed, and its tumultuous presence broke heaven and earth wherever it touched. He found himself caught in a vortex, a swirling maelstrom of raw judgment, ever sucking him in and down. He struggled, he fought with his limbs, wings, and tail, but all this was utterly inconsequential in the face of the downward force dragging him into the fathomless depths below.
He spun and he spun as he fell, a screaming and flailing mass of terror. An entity, the entity, the oscillating vapor-like being that had been the catalyst for all this, regarded him curiously as he fell and screamed.
“Isn’t this what you wanted?”
* * *
Peter screamed, a deafening roar so loud it shook his own skull. He screamed and screamed until realization came that there was nothing else around him and... he wasn’t falling anymore. Gasping for breath, he slumped over in exhaustion, too tired to move or think. He had no idea as to where he was, but it was difficult to bring himself to care.
Darkness prevailed all around, with not the slightest ray of light to penetrate the total blanket of pitch blackness that grasped him. He heard the faintest echoes of his own movements and that of the calmly sloshing water, indicating a cave of some sort. But there was solid ground beneath him, and he was alive. For that he felt grateful for the first time in what felt like an eternity.
Tears flowed and sobs choked him as he lay prostrate in the darkness. As memories came back to him as he awakened back into consciousness, he sobbed all the more. He remembered the waterfall, falling off what seemed to be the edge of the world. He remembered falling and falling...
Of course, he also was reminded anew of what happened before, what had set him off on this path in the first place. And how he had tried to end this pointless journey; he had tried to do it twice.
But... both times he had not taken the final step. Both times he had attempted with all his might...
Why!? Why couldn’t he do it? Why did he always have to panic at the last moment? He felt the anger, he wanted to be upset, but...
Deep but unsatisfying sighs were forced between his sobs. His muscles were slack, his grip on the ground weak. He wanted nothing more than to just lie down; trips through hell had taken their toll.
How long he slept, he didn’t know. In this dark place there was no reference point, just darkness and echoes.
And... as he roused from his slumber, there was something else, a deep, shaking rumbling at the edge of hearing. He laid prostrate, trying to discern what the noise was; the elongated, fined ears that his dragon body possessed twitched and moved in an attempt to track it down, a still alien process that sickened him, but yet so did every other aspect of his body. He had spent untold amounts of time in the past few days, or weeks, loathing all of it, but such feelings were diMinishing to a numb sensation at the back of his mind; still present, but no longer as forceful or pressing.
Still, none of this helped him determine what this sound was or where it was coming from. His vision was eerily black; his new eyes could see body heat, but along with his dark surroundings, his own scales seemed to insulate his body heat, preventing it from escaping. The only indication he had at all that he wasn’t blind was that he could see the telltale wisps of heat from the vapors of his own exhalation.
With nothing else around him, and silently dreading any serious amount of time with only darkness and his own mind, there really wasn’t any other choice than to heave himself off the ground and search for whatever was making the rumbling. If nothing else, he was staving off the madness.
He found water within ten feet or so of him, at least he thought; his sense of scale had been thrown off ever since he had transformed and he had some deal of difficulty judging sizes or distances with the accuracy he used to.
Thinking about it, how had he gotten down... “here” in the first place? He had fallen off an end of the world waterfall that had hadn’t been able to see the bottom of; shouldn’t he have been dead? Why was he still alive at all? And that nightmare... He had had many dreams, good and bad, in his life, but he had never dreamt up such a real and painful one as that. It had felt so real. More than that, in many ways it had felt more so, like he had...
Perhaps, given that he had just come face to face, or so he had believed at the time, with his own demise he had had a near death experience. In a dark sort of sense, he could see how that worked. His life had flashed before his eyes, only instead of his entire life, it had zeroed in on that one event, that one choice that would now forever define him.
“Angel...” he whispered futilely to the darkness, answered only by dull empty echoes. He had made his choice, and now it seemed he wasn’t strong enough to do anything but helplessly trudge along the trench he had dug for himself.
As the darkness dragged on, he noticed that the sound had died down and was barely audible. Distressed, he wandered around in the infinite darkness, stumbling about dejectedly until he ran his snout smack into a wall. Dizzied for a moment, he felt his way along the wall’s side for reference.
Based on what he knew of caves, his odds for simply stumbling upon the exit (if there was one) were remote. Depending on how deep he was, he could be days, weeks, even months from just coming across it. Some caves could be absolutely huge, extending for miles beneath the surface and spiraling outwards ten or a hundred times that. The thought of him wandering for all that time in the dark with just his thoughts...
He shut his eyes and gnashed his teeth, banishing the thought; it was the last thing he needed to think about, though in truth he wasn’t sure what he should be thinking about.
It was a struggle to keep moving without his thoughts running off on him. It all felt like a lifetime ago already, and life back home felt even more distant, like it took place in a whole different universe, which Peter mused with humorless mirth may not have been far from the truth. It all seemed so... distant, so removed, so far that... Was it even possible that he could ever return home? Considering how they never figured out how they left the “real” world, all that ground covered, not to mention he had no idea how the waterfall had brought him to this cave...
But this was all irrelevant; how could he go back, not just physically; how could he live with himself? What could he do once he got there? How would he explain himself? And this was the problems not even associated with the fact that he wasn’t human anymore.
His mind’s mulling continued, cycling the same thoughts over and over again, never diMinishing or ceasing their endless repetition. But, as always, it came down to that one moment, that one choice. All the possibilities in the universe, and the instant he had seen that one choice, he had grabbed it without thinking, without consideration. And now, here he was, living his dream. How does it feel? part of him demanded cruelly. You got your wish, how does it feel?
Again and again, the damning thoughts repeated themselves, almost causing him to miss noticing something visible. As he did a double take, he realized that to his right several rocks were glowing with heat. Blinking at one of the first things he had actually seen in this cave, Peter stood somewhat stupefied for a long while before deciding this might be something he would want to look at.
As he approached, some irrational, crazy hope welled up, not so much the hope that sees the world becoming better, but that of a man so overcome by starvation that he can barely think spotting the smallest crumb of bread. What he came upon was little more than rocks that had been recently heated... as well as cooling but still quite hot water. What was this?
His question was answered when the noise returned, this time a rumbling that quaked the ground beneath his feet and the stone surrounding him, briefly giving him fear that he’d soon be buried in rock. Instead, another reverberation crashed through and a great roar of... something, blasted from behind the wall in front of him. A hot mist fell upon his face, carrying a deep mineral aroma with it; seconds later the cascade died down, leaving only a torrent of what had to be water droplets raining down the other side from what it sounded like.
It had to be... a geyser or some other heated water mechanism, something below was heating the water to the point that it was exploding outwards. The wall in front of him was the only thing between it and him, and it wasn’t completely sealed, as evidenced by the fine spray that hung in the air and the continuous trickle of water seeping near the wall’s bottom.
Peter did the only thing his battered mind could think of; he started smashing the wall open. That heated water was going somewhere, and for lack of a better destination somewhere was exactly where he was going. Swipes, shoulder bashes, headbutts, Peter used all of it to plow down this obstacle.
The rock wall was surprisingly thin, only about two feet or so, and his newfound strength, whatever its moral origins, proved quite effective in demolishing it, and it took only moments for him to break it open almost completely, though for his new massive form it proved quite a squeeze.
Scrunching his way in like an adult squeezing into a treehouse, he was momentarily blinded by the first true light he had seen since the wastes. Distantly shining down and illuminating the airborne droplets of water, it came from somewhere distant above. Sticking his head in, he found himself in a vertical stone tube, stretching into black forbidden depths below where a slow, constant hiss of steam emanated from, and a distant prick of light straight up.
The decision was relatively simple; even if he were to reemerge into the wastes or someplace equally horrible, up there were preferable to down here. Slowly, he eased himself into the tube with as much steadiness as possible, trying his best not to lose his footing, which was somewhat hard to come by. The advantage of being as huge as he was was that his massive frame was almost as big as the geyser tube itself, meaning that if he lost his footing he wouldn’t fall far before he got wedged. When that happened he could start up again. The disadvantage came in that he ended up getting wedged. Several times was afraid he had gotten himself permanently stuck. Also was the fact that footholds that would have supported him... before... were no longer anywhere close to adequate to hold him up now.
He reached up for another jutting rock, but the sheer force that gravity exerted upon his massive frame shattered it, causing him to scramble to keep steady. He tried using his wings to give some thrust upwards, but more often than not he would just scrape them on the rockface more than he would produce any upward force. His newfound appendages were just too unfamiliar for him to be using them with any skill.
As he regained a precarious balance, he was scanning for another foothold when the quaking noise returned, accompanied by a roaring wave of scalding steam that overtook him in an instant.
There was no time to register or react before the water came, a boiling superheated mixture of liquid and steam that assaulted him with enough force to bat a horse spinning through the sky, tearing him from his footholds and catapulting him upwards, hurtling and bashing him against the tube’s sides like a pinball machine, smashing and battering him nearly to unconsciousness.
The pounding continued in a dizzying, relentless montage until light overwhelmed his vision and he found himself smacked down on his belly. Horizontally. Amidst the deluge of the scorching hot water, the only thing he could do was try and put distance between him and the hole he presumed he had just spectacularly exited.
Crawling forward with one clawed hand dragging after the other, it took minutes for his eyes to cease being overwhelmed by the daylight, long minutes where the only things he was aware of were a continued dizziness and the aches and bruises of every single part of his body. As the world spun around him in a whirling malisma, thoughts returned to that one thing, that one moment that may as well have been the only thing that had ever happened in his life.
“Angel...” he whispered as he blinked in and out of consciousness. “Angel, I’m so sorry...”
* * *
It was a forest, looming beyond the geyser’s clearing at a distance of a hundred yards or so. Probably it was a lush one, with the look of something wild and untamed, but there was one thing keeping Peter from admiring it.
He didn’t care. He couldn’t care. What did it matter? So what that this place had life when all he had seen for the past week or longer was dead wastes or nothing at all. In this place, life went on, just as it had for however many millennia before he had even been born. Without him. So what that it was life? Life was a heartless, callous bitch that cared nothing for individuals, only the whole. The forest mattered, individual trees or creatures mattered only insofar as they helped the life of the whole. That was the way of things. Besides, the last time he had been around such verdant growth had been at the garden.
The whole thing was a rock that no matter how hard he tried to move uphill, it always kept trying to roll back down and crush him. Always the same thoughts, always the same pattern, always the same struggle. Always the same slog.
The wind brushed the distant trees to and fro, and the continually rising steam of the now sleeping geyser wafted in billows that would temporarily obscure his surroundings, wavering like ghosts before him. They may have been real ghosts altogether as far as he was concerned, he couldn’t care about it either way. There wasn’t any room left to care, which is why he didn’t pay any attention to the small blue furry thing approaching him from the woods.
The fact that it was blue should have immediately piqued his interest, but he didn’t even move his eyes to track it. It was just another fly, another smote of dust in the larger existence of things, as common and trivial as any pebble he could pick up that littered the ground near his claws.
The blue thing came closer from the side of his vision; distantly its movements registered in his mind as some kind of four legged animal with a poofing tail which swaged up and down. There was only utter indifference on his part, his blank stare at nothing at all making him appear almost dead; only his slow, lethargic breathing gave any hint that he was alive.
Disappearing from his angle of vision for a moment, the blue thing reappeared seconds later, creeping toward him with a ginger caution, yet driven by an unmistakable curiosity. It crept closer, sniffing him from afar before sneaking in another few feet, then observing intently for any reactions. Slowly, it made its way right in front of his face.
Something faintly resembling a fox, the blue creature possessed an odd combination of fur and feathers; soft tussled fur covered most of the body with feathery plumages sprouting from the head and tail. Odd triple pronged ears drooped slightly from, perking up at random moments, and the eyes glistened a curious yellowish-green color.
“Hello.”
If he had been in any other mood than pure, indifferent exhaustion, he would have jumped back startled at the realization that the strange creature in front of him had just spoken. As he instead responded with nothing at all, the creature, whose voice sounded somewhat like a she, and a fairly young one at that, responded by planting herself right smack in Peter’s line of sight, deliberately occupying the center of his vision just in front of his snout.
“Hello,” the creature repeated, cocking her head to the side curiously.
“I said hello,” she insisted in a childlike manner, growing somewhat frustrated at his continued lack of any reaction whatsoever. She wandered to his left, putting herself inches away from his eyes. Sniffing some, she still elicited nothing from him. Emitting a small bestial growl of frustration which would have sounded amusing any other time, she went for the direct approach and with a small precise leap climbed right on top of his snout and stared him square in the eyes.
A thought occurred behind her eyes as she breathed in a childlike realization of discovery. “Maybe... maybe you can’t talk yet?” she asked as she shifted on his snout.
Finally, her continued haphazard balancing act right atop of his snout made him twitch, and with a deep, heavy sigh he realized that a child of this age, human or not, just wasn’t going to leave well enough alone, especially one this prying and curious. “Don’t you have somewhere you should be?” he asked softly.
The blue fox-thing, wide eyed and excited at eliciting a reaction, shook her head. “Nope,” she declared as only a young child can, “I’m exploring and as long as I stay in the forest I can go wherever I want.”
“...Isn’t... doesn’t the forest end just right there?” he asked indicating to the tree line.
“No silly!” she exclaimed as though it were the most obvious thing in the universe. “The Hot Gushers are part of the forest too! I can come in just as long as I don’t get too close to the Gushers themselves.”
Taking “Gusher” as referring to the geysers, he answered back, “Aren’t you... well, too close now?”
“Well...” she trailed off, caught red handed but trying to worm her way out. “You’re right here, and you aren’t getting burned,” she pointed out.
Peter shook his head, and action which nearly sent the young creature tumbling off at which point she got down herself while she was ahead. “No, this isn’t likely to be the safest of places for you. I already got a nasty beating from this place and it’d probably do worse to you.”
She examined him scrutinizingly. “But you aren’t burned at all!” she protested
“That’s because...” Peter began, only for his stomach to tighten at the refutation that popped into his mind, “That’s because I’m a dragon.”
“Wow!” she exclaimed, ogling him as she turned her head all over to get a good look at him. “I’ve never met a dragon. You must really be tough!”
Shifting his legs after hours of being splayed out, his muscles and joints ached as he let out a deep but unsatisfying sigh “You should probably move away from here so you don’t get any burns yourself.”
“Well, ok then,” she acquiesced as she got up. “I can’t wait to tell the others; I found a dragon sitting by the Hot Gushers! They’ll be so surprised!” Then her face soured somewhat as some realization came over her. “But they might not believe me, they always say I make stuff up...” A light came on in her eyes. “I have an idea, you could come with me! There’s no way they can say I’m making something up then!”
Even though he had been deprived of human... or any contact at all for what felt like an eternity, the thought of being randomly introduced to anybody at this point wasn’t exactly something he relished. This creature only got him to respond because she was an annoyingly persistent child. But other people...
Saying nothing, he simply lifted himself from the ground and gave her a resigned look, something she did not fail to instantly seize upon. “You’ll come? Thanks! This is going to so exciting! Come on, I’ll take you to them!” she exclaimed and bolted off, indicating with her head for him to follow. “They’re going to be so surprised, they’ll treat you really nice, and we haven’t had a dragon come by in a long time! A real long time. I’m sure they’ll throw you a festival and give you gifts too!”
Peter grimaced as his stomach sloshed nauseatingly. The fox creature caught wind of his frown and looked at him curiously. Just what was he going to do, run away? Aside from the fact that he had very little strength left in his body, she might not take it too well if he just up and bolted. “Just... it just hurts a little to walk, that’s all. The ‘Gushers’ gave me a few aches.”
“Ok,” she said as she accepted him at face value. “Oh!” she suddenly exclaimed. “I forgot to tell you my name! I’m Dirnie,” she grinned foolishly and sheepishly, “what’s yours?”
“Peter.”
“Peter?” she repeated, “That’s a funny name for a dragon.”
“Probably is.”
“THE ACCUSED WILL STEP FORWARD.”
The voice was not something to be defied; it was law. It was That which Was. He stepped forward as it commanded.
He stood before a great throne, glistening with alabaster and the finest gems, outshining the sun in its radiance. He couldn’t look upon the source of the Voice; there were several times that he tried, but each time he was forced to turn away lest his eyes be burned in their sockets. Instead, his eyes settled elsewhere. Only the foot of the throne was visible, encrusted with gold and jewels. And of course, there was the only other being nearby, standing next to the throne on his left.
She stood there, dressed in clothes that did not seem out of place on a six year old American girl, though they seemed as rags in their filth, covered in dirt and grime. Yet despite her frumpy appearance, there was a strange authority in her stance; a clout, an influence that belied her sullied exterior.
She was the one who would speak against him. Peter’s knees buckled on the spot, weighted down under a nauseating wave of one emotion in particular, one that seeped into his bones and soured his belly. She would be the witness against him. She would deliver the testimony.
She would be the one who spoke the truth.
“THE WITNESS WILL SPEAK HER TESTIMONY.”
Dread cast its pall over him, squeezing all hope and comfort from him like a wet rag being strung dry. Words came to his mind; he wanted to assure her, console her. He wanted to make things better, wanted to fix what had gone wrong.
He wanted to tell her was sorry.
But as his ever sickening stomach told him, as the crushing weight on his shoulders bore him down with, as every fiber of his being screamed to him, it wasn’t…
Angel stood as from nowhere a pure white cloth was placed on her shoulders, covering her dirtied, shredded rags. With aching deliberation, the six year old raised her head, though her eyes steadfastly focused downward, seemingly unwilling to cast their gaze up to meet her eldest brother. It was all he could do to keep from burying his head in shame; he could not fathom looking into her eyes... and seeing. But guilt and morbid curiosity held his face forward, though in the process sapping every ounce of strength he had left.
At long last, however, the pitiful creature raised her eyes, and for one moment their gazes locked, and what Peter saw tore into his gut and eviscerated his soul.
She was afraid.
Of him.
Peter gasped in shame and horror and would have collapsed on the spot were it not for the iron shackles that held aloft his arms; thus he sagged, the screaming clangs of the metal chains preventing him from falling into a sprawled out slumber of fatigue and shame. Instead he dangled like some hunk of meat, or like a Roman convict undergoing crucifixion, left in the open for all to see and mock.
No mockers came. Instead they came.
“See!” came the horrible raspy declaration. “See what a wretched thing he is!”
“Yes,” came another, “The smell of treachery is upon this one.”
“See!” came yet another, “This one is the Betrayer.”
The overwhelming brightness of his surroundings subsided, though the throne remained as bright and clear as ever. From the edges came a creeping darkness, a suffocating pall that encroached upon him like a creeping wave of noxious fumes. The demons began entering his sight.
Like dark whispers they came, creeping upon him and slowly chattering amongst themselves, a harsh murmur sounding like the gnashing of teeth. Their demonic forms hunched over and exuded darkness, standing in stark contrast to their hideously glowing eyes, burning a monstrous orange.
And they slowly began their demonic Chorus.
“Sinner.”
“Liar.”
“Selfish one!”
They swarmed him from all sides like a throng of hecklers, soon numbering in the dozens, staring at him like some spectacle, some portent. Slowly, a whisper took shape midst their throng.
It was a quiet thing, less a sound in and of itself but more of an echo, an insubstantial resonance that found its way into the recesses of his heart, reverberating through and striking the darker corners. A bone shattering shrill screamed out; Peter’s attempts to cover his ears were broken as his binding chains halted his hands midair.
“See!”
“See!”
Like the air-scorched aftermath of a bomb the echo stopped, but all did not become quiet. Instead, the ugly screeching notes that began slowly deep within grew and began to blossom, echoing and spreading outwards. The demons’ eyes lit as if a fire spread amongst them, a quiet rabidity that inundated life from the surroundings.
In their eyes was the look of fellowship; they had found one of their own kind.
“See!”
Screaming, he struggled against his chains, desperately trying to summon the will to break free. Energy and resolve he suddenly found in quantity, but the irons binding him were unbending and uncompromising, doing nothing but hold him in place and mar his flesh. As he fought in vain to free himself, he felt the screeching spread, ringing and shrilling and casting all else aside. It forced itself to the fore of his mind, drowning all else. Soon he felt it reverberate all the way to his chains.
The irons binding him shook with the screeching, so much so they grew infused with it causing them to glow, glowing a searing white hot. And, as all white hot things do once they reach a breaking point, it began to melt. It began to burn and singe into his skin, melting into him like a cream or lotion, though the absorption was far less pleasant. It burned through, painfully working its way into his blood and hitchhiking back into his heart. And here, it touched the dark corner that was screeching.
And with that the Chorus began in earnest, all the while as Angel watched.
Fuming, burning acid filled his body, scouring every cell, every corner within, ripping it all aside and making way for what was to come, a reflection of what already was. Here it came, here it was; he was showing his true colors, and yet all he could do was stare with pleading and shame at his terrified sister. She stared back, unable to break the lock, her soft blue eyes wide and running with tears. Peter started to shed tears of his own, but these quickly gave way to streams and droplets of acid, searing and etching his cheeks and eyes.
Stumbling back and screaming, Peter clutched at his face as the screeching chorus pricked and pierced his skin, searing it and cracking it as it withered into a dry husk, disfiguring and deforming it. It was as if his skin were molting ashes, a shedding of skin brought on by acid and fire. Clenching his teeth, he struggled to breathe as his lungs were sent into spasms.
A snap, a cracking of stone sounded out and Peter belatedly realized his right index finger felt as though it had been dipped in napalm. He didn’t want to look, nothing in him did, but the fear was more powerful than the shock. His gaze turned and his eyes fixed upon a dark, sharp, protrusion on the tip of his finger.
He stumbled back for breath in denial, eyes snared at his claw as if by taut chains. “...O... Oh no...” his rattled, rasping voice whispered.
Another pain struck; a squirming, wrenching spurt in his lower vertebra that soon launched itself violently. Snapping around in anguish and surprise, he found a short but growing fleshy appendage growing outwards in grotesque, violent bursts. All the while, the Chorus had morphed from a screech to a scream, pounding against him from within and ever forcing its alteration to his body forward.
“Please... Please no...”
“See!” the demons hissed, “See, join.”
“Join,” another repeated.
“Join!”
One of the devils charged at him, gripping and holding his arm, to be followed by a plethora of his fellows who congregated around him, hissing and chanting, adding to the shrill screaming of the Chorus, an unholy cacophony that burst his body and sent him reeling.
The Chorus commanded, and his bones shuddered and lurched, shoving and shifting the flesh around them which conformed unevenly and out of step, wrenching and twisting his tissue with the most extreme of callousness.
The demons pressed in from all sides, squeezing his agonized form so much that the distinction between them was becoming less and less. He could feel them, not just their bodies but their essences as they were carried by the Chorus, attracted by the devilish cacophony emanating from within him, weaving and entwining themselves into it. Their eternal rot and wickedness flowed freely within, bringing to the open what once before existed only within the ugly shadows that he never spoke of or acknowledged.
It was the Chorus of Lies; betrayal and hatred hung thick in the air as Peter exhaled in his wheezing and screaming.
The assembly surrounding him hissed in excitement, now less a gaggle of dark Minions than a cloud of pure darkness, consisting of droplets of condensed evil. His labored breathing stirred it like a swarm of wasps; it congregated around him, positioning itself right where he would breathe it in. He tried not to breathe, but his constant agony and continuous pains made abstaining impossible. It seeped into his flesh, squirming its way inside him like a pack of hungry worms. It dug into his tissue and mingled with his blood. That which he couldn’t help but breathe in dashed for his lungs as a parasite looking for a nest within his gut, to makes its home there.
A forceful cascade of drums punched through his back, mangling his skeleton and forcing the bones to branch outward, piercing muscle, nerves, and skin, skin that by now was little more than flaking ashes. Suddenly with a great heave his skin rippled and quaked, shaking and falling off in crumbling chunks and scattering in a blinding cloud of dust.
He screamed an unearthly howl as his vocal cords rasped, disintegrated and reshaped themselves, forcing him to cough on their ashes as they fell down his throat. Still, there was only one thing that truly held his attention, one thing that mattered. “An-“ he hacked and wheezed as the churning wracked and melted pieces of his flesh. “Ang-Angel... Please,” his shattered remnants of a voice rasped out. “Please...”
A cascading wave of screeching pummeled through his skull, warping and distorting it; with cracks and the creaking of bone it snapped its way forward. The Chorus’s resonating shattered his teeth like glass, leaving broken remnants that were pounded out by the sharp tearing instruments that stabbed their way through his gums, the teeth of a flesh rending predator.
As his body convulsed and was wracked by the thundering drumbeats, his skin cracked and fell to pieces like an ancient statue left under the constant erosion of acidic rain. His face split open like a broken mask, exploding like a hot light bulb with water thrown onto it; with an ear piercing shatter it splintered into a thousand pieces, the façade shattering forever. Breaking into dust it swirled around him in a black maelstrom that obscured his sight; the dust grew so oppressively thick he could not get a clear breath without choking and coughing as each breath brought another lungful of grime and ashes. His face, now free of the mask heaved forward like a cloud of nerve gas released from its canister; his shifting skull violently pressing itself onward to show its naked form to the world, a thing of blackness and deceit.
Gasps of horror ushered and Angel recoiled, crawling away on her back, her legs quaking too much for her to stand. Even midst his agony, as his vision blurred and shifted, dust swirled everywhere, and his body warped from its humanity, he saw her clear as day. “Angel... P...” he stopped and clenched his shifting teeth and his hands of bone, twisted flesh and ashes, “Please, I didn’t mean...”
An explosion the likes of Mt. Vesuvius erupted in his back, accompanied by a hammer of pain that knocked the wind out of him, decking him in a face-plant to the ground. His distorting face, rapidly forming into a snout, pushed his head back, forcing it off the ground as his snout grew longer and larger and craning his neck at an odd angle. Immediately bones shot through his back, spiking and radiating outward like a flower, blossoming midst the maelstrom of dust into an array of dark flesh. Thick membranes grew and dangled from them, hanging like hides from freshly slaughtered animals.
His lower spine punctured ever outward into a tail, curling around itself as the nerves and muscles fought like rabid dogs to assert themselves. Mass added itself from nowhere, weighing him down with more and more draconic flesh, leaving him struggling to breathe as his muscles fought to catch up with the rest of the growth. His hips twisted and asserted new shapes, his legs reassembled themselves with a deafening roar, soon they too grew to reflect the Chorus’s dark, twisted design.
Soon there was but one last thing that remained definitely human. Peter focused all his desperate, scrambling will to stare at his sister, to show her that he was still here as she knew him, to show her before...
It was too late. An ashen wind pierced his eyes, darkening and dissolving them, casting aside the old discarded flesh that now crumbled into ashes and dispersed itself into the dust storm. His agonized screams which sounded less and less human could not drown out the Chorus as it exacted its work, forging its own eyes for him, the red, slit-pupiled eyes of a demon.
There was no single thing left to identify this mass of darkness and ashes as a human being, nothing except a vague shape that was merely a ghostly echo of what once was; that and a screaming imprisoned presence within that beat with futile maddened despair against its cage, a mind that despite everything that remained all too human.
His hideous, malformed body now shaped itself quickly with the prodding of the cloud of darkness, and his massive hellish form, that which existed before only as an echo in the dark secret corners of his being, was becoming reality.
Now the Chorus resounded further, and as it reverberated through him a covering of rusted red scales at last began to cover his body, wrapping him and sealing the darkness within him. His vocal chords at last aligned, and with the end of his metamorphosis the Chorus reached it massive, terrifying crescendo. He had no choice but to add his own voice to it, a hellish, inhuman roar that shook the heavens around him, trembling the world just as it wracked his own being. A scream of agony and grief, it sounded of a great and terrible beast with the heart of nothing more than a pitiful, wretched, selfish human being.
Having reached its thunderous climax, the Chorus died down and quieted. But it didn’t disappear entirely; Peter was still breathing.
With fear and trembling, Peter attempted to steady himself and slow his breathing. The pain, at least, was gone. But his entire body felt wrong. And as he opened his eyes, he saw things humans were never meant to see. He saw his sister less as he saw her before, her soft, peach skin outshone by the heat radiating off her; her tender, innocent face a burning image of searing infrared. His stomach heaved at how his own eyes were doing this.
Angel, having seen this revelation and his eyes having been opened, had fallen on her back, overwhelmed with indescribable fear, too petrified even to cry. Her eyes were locked on him, this thing that she had thought had been her loving, older brother.
“Angel,” he whispered frantically, scrambling to for the words. “I-I... I’m so sorry,” was the only pathetic answer he could give. Her face remained a contorted mask of terror, the lines of which so deeply etched that she would never know a smile again.
“THE WITNESS HAS SPOKEN HER TESTIMONY,” the Voice returned, followed by a long, unbroken silence. The dragon that called itself Peter stood apprehensively, attempting to control his breathing and trying his utmost not to break down weeping on the spot.
“THE CULPABILITY OF THE ACCUSED IS DECIDED.” A further pause sent Peter’s heart racing uncontrollably.
“GUILTY.”
He had known in his mind that such would be the verdict with an almost absolute certainty. This did nothing to prepare him for the weight of that one word. It slammed into him, crashing into him like a ton of bricks, like a mountain, taking away every last piece of hope and shattering it like glass. His lungs seized and his throat constricted, his face froze and his blood turned to ice.
Searching for something, anything to grasp onto, he turned to his sister, panic and desperation covering his face. “Angel please. Please! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I never wanted...”
His sister did not respond, only standing up trembling as a strange glowing hand appeared holding something that was extended for her to take. “Please! I never meant for any of this to happen!”
She took the implement as it was offered to her.
“I’m sorry! Angel! Angel!!” he screamed in desperate sobs, his voice becoming choked with tears.
Her finger found a switch on the object, turning it on. The flashlight erupted on with an unnatural fury, cleaving the universe around them and able to smash the mightiest of mountains.
And then she pointed it at him.
The light blasted, seared, cut into him like millions of tiny knives, pounding him, thrashing him, throwing him into writhing torment. His pleas were drowned as nothing but deafened screams could escape his mouth. The light blasted away the ground, pelting and pummeling him with debris. He sank his hideous draconic claws down to find a foothold, but everything he scrambled to find gave way to the light’s terrible power.
A cascade of raw cosmic energy had been unleashed, and its tumultuous presence broke heaven and earth wherever it touched. He found himself caught in a vortex, a swirling maelstrom of raw judgment, ever sucking him in and down. He struggled, he fought with his limbs, wings, and tail, but all this was utterly inconsequential in the face of the downward force dragging him into the fathomless depths below.
He spun and he spun as he fell, a screaming and flailing mass of terror. An entity, the entity, the oscillating vapor-like being that had been the catalyst for all this, regarded him curiously as he fell and screamed.
“Isn’t this what you wanted?”
* * *
Peter screamed, a deafening roar so loud it shook his own skull. He screamed and screamed until realization came that there was nothing else around him and... he wasn’t falling anymore. Gasping for breath, he slumped over in exhaustion, too tired to move or think. He had no idea as to where he was, but it was difficult to bring himself to care.
Darkness prevailed all around, with not the slightest ray of light to penetrate the total blanket of pitch blackness that grasped him. He heard the faintest echoes of his own movements and that of the calmly sloshing water, indicating a cave of some sort. But there was solid ground beneath him, and he was alive. For that he felt grateful for the first time in what felt like an eternity.
Tears flowed and sobs choked him as he lay prostrate in the darkness. As memories came back to him as he awakened back into consciousness, he sobbed all the more. He remembered the waterfall, falling off what seemed to be the edge of the world. He remembered falling and falling...
Of course, he also was reminded anew of what happened before, what had set him off on this path in the first place. And how he had tried to end this pointless journey; he had tried to do it twice.
But... both times he had not taken the final step. Both times he had attempted with all his might...
Why!? Why couldn’t he do it? Why did he always have to panic at the last moment? He felt the anger, he wanted to be upset, but...
Deep but unsatisfying sighs were forced between his sobs. His muscles were slack, his grip on the ground weak. He wanted nothing more than to just lie down; trips through hell had taken their toll.
How long he slept, he didn’t know. In this dark place there was no reference point, just darkness and echoes.
And... as he roused from his slumber, there was something else, a deep, shaking rumbling at the edge of hearing. He laid prostrate, trying to discern what the noise was; the elongated, fined ears that his dragon body possessed twitched and moved in an attempt to track it down, a still alien process that sickened him, but yet so did every other aspect of his body. He had spent untold amounts of time in the past few days, or weeks, loathing all of it, but such feelings were diMinishing to a numb sensation at the back of his mind; still present, but no longer as forceful or pressing.
Still, none of this helped him determine what this sound was or where it was coming from. His vision was eerily black; his new eyes could see body heat, but along with his dark surroundings, his own scales seemed to insulate his body heat, preventing it from escaping. The only indication he had at all that he wasn’t blind was that he could see the telltale wisps of heat from the vapors of his own exhalation.
With nothing else around him, and silently dreading any serious amount of time with only darkness and his own mind, there really wasn’t any other choice than to heave himself off the ground and search for whatever was making the rumbling. If nothing else, he was staving off the madness.
He found water within ten feet or so of him, at least he thought; his sense of scale had been thrown off ever since he had transformed and he had some deal of difficulty judging sizes or distances with the accuracy he used to.
Thinking about it, how had he gotten down... “here” in the first place? He had fallen off an end of the world waterfall that had hadn’t been able to see the bottom of; shouldn’t he have been dead? Why was he still alive at all? And that nightmare... He had had many dreams, good and bad, in his life, but he had never dreamt up such a real and painful one as that. It had felt so real. More than that, in many ways it had felt more so, like he had...
Perhaps, given that he had just come face to face, or so he had believed at the time, with his own demise he had had a near death experience. In a dark sort of sense, he could see how that worked. His life had flashed before his eyes, only instead of his entire life, it had zeroed in on that one event, that one choice that would now forever define him.
“Angel...” he whispered futilely to the darkness, answered only by dull empty echoes. He had made his choice, and now it seemed he wasn’t strong enough to do anything but helplessly trudge along the trench he had dug for himself.
As the darkness dragged on, he noticed that the sound had died down and was barely audible. Distressed, he wandered around in the infinite darkness, stumbling about dejectedly until he ran his snout smack into a wall. Dizzied for a moment, he felt his way along the wall’s side for reference.
Based on what he knew of caves, his odds for simply stumbling upon the exit (if there was one) were remote. Depending on how deep he was, he could be days, weeks, even months from just coming across it. Some caves could be absolutely huge, extending for miles beneath the surface and spiraling outwards ten or a hundred times that. The thought of him wandering for all that time in the dark with just his thoughts...
He shut his eyes and gnashed his teeth, banishing the thought; it was the last thing he needed to think about, though in truth he wasn’t sure what he should be thinking about.
It was a struggle to keep moving without his thoughts running off on him. It all felt like a lifetime ago already, and life back home felt even more distant, like it took place in a whole different universe, which Peter mused with humorless mirth may not have been far from the truth. It all seemed so... distant, so removed, so far that... Was it even possible that he could ever return home? Considering how they never figured out how they left the “real” world, all that ground covered, not to mention he had no idea how the waterfall had brought him to this cave...
But this was all irrelevant; how could he go back, not just physically; how could he live with himself? What could he do once he got there? How would he explain himself? And this was the problems not even associated with the fact that he wasn’t human anymore.
His mind’s mulling continued, cycling the same thoughts over and over again, never diMinishing or ceasing their endless repetition. But, as always, it came down to that one moment, that one choice. All the possibilities in the universe, and the instant he had seen that one choice, he had grabbed it without thinking, without consideration. And now, here he was, living his dream. How does it feel? part of him demanded cruelly. You got your wish, how does it feel?
Again and again, the damning thoughts repeated themselves, almost causing him to miss noticing something visible. As he did a double take, he realized that to his right several rocks were glowing with heat. Blinking at one of the first things he had actually seen in this cave, Peter stood somewhat stupefied for a long while before deciding this might be something he would want to look at.
As he approached, some irrational, crazy hope welled up, not so much the hope that sees the world becoming better, but that of a man so overcome by starvation that he can barely think spotting the smallest crumb of bread. What he came upon was little more than rocks that had been recently heated... as well as cooling but still quite hot water. What was this?
His question was answered when the noise returned, this time a rumbling that quaked the ground beneath his feet and the stone surrounding him, briefly giving him fear that he’d soon be buried in rock. Instead, another reverberation crashed through and a great roar of... something, blasted from behind the wall in front of him. A hot mist fell upon his face, carrying a deep mineral aroma with it; seconds later the cascade died down, leaving only a torrent of what had to be water droplets raining down the other side from what it sounded like.
It had to be... a geyser or some other heated water mechanism, something below was heating the water to the point that it was exploding outwards. The wall in front of him was the only thing between it and him, and it wasn’t completely sealed, as evidenced by the fine spray that hung in the air and the continuous trickle of water seeping near the wall’s bottom.
Peter did the only thing his battered mind could think of; he started smashing the wall open. That heated water was going somewhere, and for lack of a better destination somewhere was exactly where he was going. Swipes, shoulder bashes, headbutts, Peter used all of it to plow down this obstacle.
The rock wall was surprisingly thin, only about two feet or so, and his newfound strength, whatever its moral origins, proved quite effective in demolishing it, and it took only moments for him to break it open almost completely, though for his new massive form it proved quite a squeeze.
Scrunching his way in like an adult squeezing into a treehouse, he was momentarily blinded by the first true light he had seen since the wastes. Distantly shining down and illuminating the airborne droplets of water, it came from somewhere distant above. Sticking his head in, he found himself in a vertical stone tube, stretching into black forbidden depths below where a slow, constant hiss of steam emanated from, and a distant prick of light straight up.
The decision was relatively simple; even if he were to reemerge into the wastes or someplace equally horrible, up there were preferable to down here. Slowly, he eased himself into the tube with as much steadiness as possible, trying his best not to lose his footing, which was somewhat hard to come by. The advantage of being as huge as he was was that his massive frame was almost as big as the geyser tube itself, meaning that if he lost his footing he wouldn’t fall far before he got wedged. When that happened he could start up again. The disadvantage came in that he ended up getting wedged. Several times was afraid he had gotten himself permanently stuck. Also was the fact that footholds that would have supported him... before... were no longer anywhere close to adequate to hold him up now.
He reached up for another jutting rock, but the sheer force that gravity exerted upon his massive frame shattered it, causing him to scramble to keep steady. He tried using his wings to give some thrust upwards, but more often than not he would just scrape them on the rockface more than he would produce any upward force. His newfound appendages were just too unfamiliar for him to be using them with any skill.
As he regained a precarious balance, he was scanning for another foothold when the quaking noise returned, accompanied by a roaring wave of scalding steam that overtook him in an instant.
There was no time to register or react before the water came, a boiling superheated mixture of liquid and steam that assaulted him with enough force to bat a horse spinning through the sky, tearing him from his footholds and catapulting him upwards, hurtling and bashing him against the tube’s sides like a pinball machine, smashing and battering him nearly to unconsciousness.
The pounding continued in a dizzying, relentless montage until light overwhelmed his vision and he found himself smacked down on his belly. Horizontally. Amidst the deluge of the scorching hot water, the only thing he could do was try and put distance between him and the hole he presumed he had just spectacularly exited.
Crawling forward with one clawed hand dragging after the other, it took minutes for his eyes to cease being overwhelmed by the daylight, long minutes where the only things he was aware of were a continued dizziness and the aches and bruises of every single part of his body. As the world spun around him in a whirling malisma, thoughts returned to that one thing, that one moment that may as well have been the only thing that had ever happened in his life.
“Angel...” he whispered as he blinked in and out of consciousness. “Angel, I’m so sorry...”
* * *
It was a forest, looming beyond the geyser’s clearing at a distance of a hundred yards or so. Probably it was a lush one, with the look of something wild and untamed, but there was one thing keeping Peter from admiring it.
He didn’t care. He couldn’t care. What did it matter? So what that this place had life when all he had seen for the past week or longer was dead wastes or nothing at all. In this place, life went on, just as it had for however many millennia before he had even been born. Without him. So what that it was life? Life was a heartless, callous bitch that cared nothing for individuals, only the whole. The forest mattered, individual trees or creatures mattered only insofar as they helped the life of the whole. That was the way of things. Besides, the last time he had been around such verdant growth had been at the garden.
The whole thing was a rock that no matter how hard he tried to move uphill, it always kept trying to roll back down and crush him. Always the same thoughts, always the same pattern, always the same struggle. Always the same slog.
The wind brushed the distant trees to and fro, and the continually rising steam of the now sleeping geyser wafted in billows that would temporarily obscure his surroundings, wavering like ghosts before him. They may have been real ghosts altogether as far as he was concerned, he couldn’t care about it either way. There wasn’t any room left to care, which is why he didn’t pay any attention to the small blue furry thing approaching him from the woods.
The fact that it was blue should have immediately piqued his interest, but he didn’t even move his eyes to track it. It was just another fly, another smote of dust in the larger existence of things, as common and trivial as any pebble he could pick up that littered the ground near his claws.
The blue thing came closer from the side of his vision; distantly its movements registered in his mind as some kind of four legged animal with a poofing tail which swaged up and down. There was only utter indifference on his part, his blank stare at nothing at all making him appear almost dead; only his slow, lethargic breathing gave any hint that he was alive.
Disappearing from his angle of vision for a moment, the blue thing reappeared seconds later, creeping toward him with a ginger caution, yet driven by an unmistakable curiosity. It crept closer, sniffing him from afar before sneaking in another few feet, then observing intently for any reactions. Slowly, it made its way right in front of his face.
Something faintly resembling a fox, the blue creature possessed an odd combination of fur and feathers; soft tussled fur covered most of the body with feathery plumages sprouting from the head and tail. Odd triple pronged ears drooped slightly from, perking up at random moments, and the eyes glistened a curious yellowish-green color.
“Hello.”
If he had been in any other mood than pure, indifferent exhaustion, he would have jumped back startled at the realization that the strange creature in front of him had just spoken. As he instead responded with nothing at all, the creature, whose voice sounded somewhat like a she, and a fairly young one at that, responded by planting herself right smack in Peter’s line of sight, deliberately occupying the center of his vision just in front of his snout.
“Hello,” the creature repeated, cocking her head to the side curiously.
“I said hello,” she insisted in a childlike manner, growing somewhat frustrated at his continued lack of any reaction whatsoever. She wandered to his left, putting herself inches away from his eyes. Sniffing some, she still elicited nothing from him. Emitting a small bestial growl of frustration which would have sounded amusing any other time, she went for the direct approach and with a small precise leap climbed right on top of his snout and stared him square in the eyes.
A thought occurred behind her eyes as she breathed in a childlike realization of discovery. “Maybe... maybe you can’t talk yet?” she asked as she shifted on his snout.
Finally, her continued haphazard balancing act right atop of his snout made him twitch, and with a deep, heavy sigh he realized that a child of this age, human or not, just wasn’t going to leave well enough alone, especially one this prying and curious. “Don’t you have somewhere you should be?” he asked softly.
The blue fox-thing, wide eyed and excited at eliciting a reaction, shook her head. “Nope,” she declared as only a young child can, “I’m exploring and as long as I stay in the forest I can go wherever I want.”
“...Isn’t... doesn’t the forest end just right there?” he asked indicating to the tree line.
“No silly!” she exclaimed as though it were the most obvious thing in the universe. “The Hot Gushers are part of the forest too! I can come in just as long as I don’t get too close to the Gushers themselves.”
Taking “Gusher” as referring to the geysers, he answered back, “Aren’t you... well, too close now?”
“Well...” she trailed off, caught red handed but trying to worm her way out. “You’re right here, and you aren’t getting burned,” she pointed out.
Peter shook his head, and action which nearly sent the young creature tumbling off at which point she got down herself while she was ahead. “No, this isn’t likely to be the safest of places for you. I already got a nasty beating from this place and it’d probably do worse to you.”
She examined him scrutinizingly. “But you aren’t burned at all!” she protested
“That’s because...” Peter began, only for his stomach to tighten at the refutation that popped into his mind, “That’s because I’m a dragon.”
“Wow!” she exclaimed, ogling him as she turned her head all over to get a good look at him. “I’ve never met a dragon. You must really be tough!”
Shifting his legs after hours of being splayed out, his muscles and joints ached as he let out a deep but unsatisfying sigh “You should probably move away from here so you don’t get any burns yourself.”
“Well, ok then,” she acquiesced as she got up. “I can’t wait to tell the others; I found a dragon sitting by the Hot Gushers! They’ll be so surprised!” Then her face soured somewhat as some realization came over her. “But they might not believe me, they always say I make stuff up...” A light came on in her eyes. “I have an idea, you could come with me! There’s no way they can say I’m making something up then!”
Even though he had been deprived of human... or any contact at all for what felt like an eternity, the thought of being randomly introduced to anybody at this point wasn’t exactly something he relished. This creature only got him to respond because she was an annoyingly persistent child. But other people...
Saying nothing, he simply lifted himself from the ground and gave her a resigned look, something she did not fail to instantly seize upon. “You’ll come? Thanks! This is going to so exciting! Come on, I’ll take you to them!” she exclaimed and bolted off, indicating with her head for him to follow. “They’re going to be so surprised, they’ll treat you really nice, and we haven’t had a dragon come by in a long time! A real long time. I’m sure they’ll throw you a festival and give you gifts too!”
Peter grimaced as his stomach sloshed nauseatingly. The fox creature caught wind of his frown and looked at him curiously. Just what was he going to do, run away? Aside from the fact that he had very little strength left in his body, she might not take it too well if he just up and bolted. “Just... it just hurts a little to walk, that’s all. The ‘Gushers’ gave me a few aches.”
“Ok,” she said as she accepted him at face value. “Oh!” she suddenly exclaimed. “I forgot to tell you my name! I’m Dirnie,” she grinned foolishly and sheepishly, “what’s yours?”
“Peter.”
“Peter?” she repeated, “That’s a funny name for a dragon.”
“Probably is.”