An Eminence? No, I am just a reaper (OC story)

Under veiled eyes

Speech = ''...''
Thoughts = [... ]

ºº

''When is this going to be over...?''

Annerose heard her companion mused through his teeth the same way an old man would curse about the weather,tired and apathetic..., the young man shrimping into a corner with a pained groan once his back leaned against the cold touch of the wall of stone. Sweat trickling down his face down his neck.

His clothes were dirty and covered both in mud and dust that seemed to cling to him with a life of their own. His once carefully treated hair was left unkempt, specks of dried blood gluing stray patches of hair together against his skin. The look of his eyes was gaunt, tired.., as if he had aged a century in a matter of days.

In a few words: He looked like shit...though not like she was any better off than him.

Her chest heaved up and down slowly inside the confines of her chest-plate, her heart felt like burning like the rest of her limbs yet she felt cold all the same. She tilted her head back a little, her eyes becoming lost as they stared at the blue shaded horizon above their heads.

No matter where she looked at.., the palette of colors was rather nice.

Warm

Calid

Peaceful...

Ah...., it was a rather nice day to have and close your eyes for a while, wasn't it..?

The skies were clear and the air was so fresh, albeit with a tinge of salt mixed in between that it clouded whatever stench the city had before. It felt as if she was inside a painting of the first days of summer.

The birds like the dead didn't have to worry in the slightest what happened down in the ground.

The ghost of the smile that had slowly tried to morph around her lips vanish with a swift brush. Leaving behind a bitter grimace as her eyes slowly receded from their solemn admiration of what laid beyond her head...and took a good look at what was left beneath it.

The ground was flooded with water, walls either broken down or in the process as leaks slowly slipped through the cracks that had been left behind. No windows had survived, allowing the cold air to come and go as it pleased through them...

If this was indeed a painting, the skies would be the heavens while the city was more akin to a hell in the making. Battered and destroyed as it was, nothing more now than a husk of what it had once been.

"When is this going to be over...?"

Thinking about it, that was a good question... wasn't it?

Her eyes searched around her, through the remains of what had been a market brewing with life, now devoid of it so much that it literally felt wrong to gaze at.

Mud, broken windows, the carcass of many buildings and the wayward remain of some fruit or meat that had not been dragged away by the tide.

Would it be in a month? A week? Today? In a few minutes..? After all the effort they had put through to reach this point, the answer was not any clearer than it was the first day.

Her eyes then switched towards the sound of footsteps approaching from the left side of the street, where a group of men where carrying away a family in hammocks. They looked bruised and battered, bandages covered with grime and blood.

But alive...

She felt the tension that had been building up slowly vanish once again, allowing her to once again slump back to her laid back position. Relief washing over her...something that she had not been allowed to enjoy for too long.