Destroyers

Chapter Two: Signs

   Content warning up ahead: if blood and severed limbs isn't your thing, you are probably not going to be a fan of this chapter. Also, chapters from now on, starting with this one, are going to be a lot longer, more around 5000-6000 words than 2000-3000. Anyway, here's Elias's chapter!

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   Elias had thought that the day just couldn't get worse, but as it turned out, life wanted to prove him wrong.

   He sat cross-legged on his four-poster bed, large blue eyes glued to the screen of his laptop, trying to understand what he was looking at. There was a monument to the great heroes who had begun this age for England, the greats like Stoneheart, Lady Lightning, The Abyss. It stood where Parliament had once stood a century ago, before its relocation after it was destroyed in a battle, and its grounds were always covered in flowers, blossoms placed by awed citizens. But that day, the grounds of the Hero Obelisk weren't covered in flowers, but in something far more horrifying. There was a message, part of it spelt out in severed arms, pinned to the monument like a grisly butterfly collection. The other part was written in what he desperately hoped was red paint and not blood, sloppy crimson letters stretching across the entire square. With hesitant fingers, he zoomed in on the image on his screen, attempting to read the message.

   "9 DAYS UNTIL JUSTICE."

   The nine's shape was constructed with arms, of varying skin tones and sizes, some of the arms large and tattooed, while other looked disturbingly small, young. All were blotchy, smeared with spatters of blood and gore. The rest of the sentence sprawled across many metres, visible from quite a distance above, and was written in crude, blotchy letters, the red liquid - whatever it was - having run and dripped in some places. It was like something from a feverish nightmare, and yet it was there, televised and on national news.

   Elias felt revulsion churning thick in his stomach. He had seen glimpses of violence before, in the rotting pits of other people's minds, but they were only glimpses. Jilted lovers dreaming of murdering their exes, broken people remembering what had been done to them, but all mercifully brief, just quick flashes of dark thoughts and flailing limbs. When on some rare occasion he was allowed to watch a film, the blood was obviously fake (though it still made him want to throw up), the actors and actresses coming home to their families at the end of the day. Not like this carnage, not this abomination of a warning. Whoever had done this wasn't human. He slammed his laptop shut, and pushed it under the covers of his bed, as if it would bite him. He tugged at his shoulder-length hair, long fingers knotting in the white strands, tugged again and again until it ached in his scalp. Everything about this felt wrong, down to his very bones and soul. This should not be happening, he thought, not in the Age of Heroes, not in a public, well-monitored square. And yet it was. Tug, tug, tug, the pain somehow reassuring.

   After a minute or so, the hair-pulling ceased, and the urge to bleach his eyes until the gruesome display was forgotten receded. Taking a careful, measured breaths, he pulled the laptop back out. He had forgotten how sick blood made him feel. He would not be zooming in again. Instead, he opened the news back up, listening to the reporter after turning on the subtitles and upping the volume. He wouldn't understand her otherwise - speech often sounded muted, strange, as if he was underwater, though his hearing was perfect. Elias listened and read with rapt attention, knuckles white from clenching the corners of the device.

   "-three of the fifteen limbs have been identified. Those remains are believed to belong to Edward Williams, a senior demolitions supervisor, Adrik Agarwal, a junior clerk for Invincible Inc, and Lucy Jenkins, a janitor at the fast-food chain BetterEats. Little information is known about this whole situation as of yet, but it has been confirmed a few minutes ago that Edward Williams was reported missing last Friday by his family."