Shadows of Elysium: The Laughing King

Chapter 3: The Code: Vigilance

The thick smell of death hit Jasper from over the hill where the small patch of woods looked out over the usually vibrant beach village. Instead of the soft sand of the beach Jasper's boot crushed a human skull and came out with a smattering of bone dust on the toes.

Three miles of sandy beach front was covered with corpses.

Fresh blood mixed with the old blood of mangled bodies and broken skeletons. The misshapen parts of mutants, animals and mutant animals; some from things Jasper couldn't even recognize with nearly thirty years of life in the wastelands. Things like horned humans and a ram skull three times the size of a full-grown bison.

Some of the mutants retained their human features and some were mutated beyond recognition. With extra limbs and sharp teeth, skin colored in ways skin didn't naturally color, and some without skin at all. A boulder with a face like a jack-o-lantern sat in a pile of gravel and rubble. It stared straight ahead with blood running out of its empty eye sockets.

Jasper took a moment to look at the giant skull, "Do you know what the cannibal got when he was late for dinner? The cold shoulder."

The stream of blood made its way down the rock to stick to a few particles of sand every second. It took a while to form a drop and fall completely.

Past the evident massacre and the village was the Gulf Sea. Many broken bodies floated in and out of the water; the red current of the gulf splashing the macabre debris against the village's support beams.

The once magnificent village on stilts had a complex arrangement of rope bridges connecting shopping huts, homes and guard towers from the outskirts to the several main platforms stacked up. Each higher landing was smaller than the last, giving the impression that you were gazing at a wooden temple on the beach.

The usually welcoming and ornate golden archways were stained blood red and corpses hung from them by various limbs. One of the outskirt landings connected by a bridge had broken free and the entire tower was hanging diagonally with only a pulley cable for support. Another hut had broken, and the wooden platform slid halfway down its posts.

Other buildings were broken; cables and bridges were loose, but more broken were the people. The former inhabitants were nailed to the posts and draped over their huts. Every cable and torn rope in sight had someone hanging from it. This wasn't the thriving beach city Jasper remembered.

On their families very first stay they had spent the night on the bottom and biggest platform with houses for the common folk and those too mutated to hunt and gather. After their very first hunt (a crocodile bigger than a house that Jasper's godfather decapitated) they stayed on the next floor up when in town; with houses and training grounds for the warriors and explorers willing to go out on supply runs.

The next level up held some political buildings and a war-room. Jasper remembered sitting in those rooms for long sessions where his godfather gave as much advice as he did argument.

On the top was a platform big enough for the throne of Old King Three-Eyes who would sit upon it when he felt the need to. Now Three-Eyes swung from the arch at the front entrance. The battlefield was a much more pleasant sight than what lay in the cloud of void that covered the throne. A new figure seemed to rest on the throne. His body was shrouded in shadow, but his head was topped with a crown of wood grown as large as an elk-boar's antlers. Glowing bulbs from a tree-parasite form in vines wrapping around the outside and an infestation of gnawing bugs crawl across entry holes all across the hallow crown. The entire entity, crown and body drips from head to toe in an inky sludge.

A dome of darkness had settled over the village like a cage. To the north horizon the red moon seemed to set and to the south the pale moon seemed to rise, but neither had moved for hours. The world remained stuck between the clashing sunsets. As beautiful as it was macabre.