Aurum

Prologue - Vastatio

devastation /dɛvəˈsteɪʃn/ noun

noun: great destruction or damage

Pillaging, he thought, was like saving what remained by destruction. There was a soft longing in his bones to find the beauty within the word destruction itself, and for a long time he thought he might have found it, but it was only a few years later that he would experience the crushing feeling of being awfully wrong. Though labelling things was an aspiration he sought after, he disliked the name of "sadism", and didn't recognise that he was the perfect synonym.

It wasn't the thrill he sought after, rifling through people's belongings as they clutched at the human barriers outside, screaming like wild animals. Incompetent soles - he knew a lot of people that liked to take advantage of their weakness at this time, but his failures didn't lie there. It wasn't the money or wealth he gained from it - a new TV, microwave, book, sold to the markets and disappearing into the mist again. He preferred the fine arts, and didn't believe people living like rats should be allowed to utter the word "cultured".

It wasn't the heat from the embers after they set the houses alight. He would bask in the warm glow, knowing what would follow was a handshake, tense swallow and a "good job...good job". What he ultimately enjoyed though, was taking little pieces from each life as he went, like collecting and creating a scrapbook made up of broken pieces of memories. The funny thing was, none of them were his own, and now he had a knack of cropping and editing himself into every picture or diary entry there was.

A lot of people told him he was a monster, a cruel piece of shit that deserved to rot in hell's chambers, never to breathe sweet air or see the light of day again. They were hypocrites - what was sweet air when their own foul bodies polluted the world itself and hung like the gases of Venus, capturing light like a prize. It was funny how these opinions arose to him, because in all truth, he thought he was a saviour. He remembered the touch of a woman's face under his hand, as he pressed the tips of his fingers into her cheeks, resting her chin in his hand to stop her from wailing away her sorrows.

"There are worse things we could do." He was deeply interested in politics, and liked to watch his social status tear in two, one climbing with black claws, higher, higher, and the other, shrivelling in a corner, groaning and moaning with suffering. He reasoned it was no use seeking admiration in a friendly nature - success came in a brutal wanting in even the lightest of days.

Too many thought things would get better after the Revolution. Too many. The only person who truly knew and thought that was Death himself, and he was never hesitant. Ten thousand people dead. The wind continued to surge over the cliff tops like before, never tentative, but now carrying a stench that made plants and people wilt in its path. Lotterly was never the same again, and no one could pretend things were okay.

He could have been an alcoholic. He could take illicit drugs. He could hit people, abuse people, rape people. But he knew there was a fine line between could and would. He had tasted the metal of blood, both his own and other's and didn't want to turn back. He didn't do it for the money, but liked the way power rippled over his skin. Was he moving forward though? He thought he was, but then their plight tried to drag him backwards again, grappling with their frail limbs and weakly tossed obscenities.

When he took his oath ten years before, he was gravely naive but strongly willed, touching his badge for the first time and feeling a skip in his body at the way it felt. Two weeks later a man died in his arms and he made another oath. Now the naivety was tainted, and his will was placed in high-esteem as he polished his badge proudly once and every night and forgot what it was like to touch a woman in the same way.

Eradicating vermin, as he so meticulously put it, was his pastime. He wore his gold uniform in ambience, tearing through walls and smashing doors like toothpicks. His wife left him when he was thirty-five, but his real heartbreak wasn't there. His limbs tingled with a dull ache, and he relished like a heroin high. Then he hit a low and craved more. His house wasn't enough, neither were his possessions. Greed for more adrenaline turned him. His son watched him writhe and flame like a dragon enclosed in fireproof chains.

On his thirty-seventh birthday, he was with a unit in the back of a M1126 with eight others. He touched his LCPD badge as the .50 calibre tore through the lining of a house. When silence ensued, they filed in, and so their job began. In the fourth room he almost couldn't recognise the person there, staring down at their weak and unmoving hands as their body painted his picture. It wasn't necessary to call the painting beautiful or sickening - someone out there would have their own opinion, because of course, that was art. He wasn't sure if they had ignored the clearance out of defiance and hope, or had just reached the end. He hated people that gave up, but hated people even more with too much hope.

He stared around the room, it was clear of anything; the others had made it before him. Things had fallen, the bed was ransacked and a window broken. Chunks of wood, the wall, and frays of concrete spilled out of the linings like the house was losing its innards. In the middle of the floor was a weather-beaten book, clutched in the final grasp.

The leather was torn, the first four pages blood-stained and the glue chewed away. Some were missing, some half-alive, most without worth. But for some reason he pocketed it, staring down at the person desperately holding it in their last moments. His footfall found him outside, the book in his grasp as he held it above his head, gold writing shimmering bleakly in the rare October sunlight. A woman's hand raised, laying claim to the book, and he didn't try to understand.

"Yours?" He peered at her, her fighting brown hair, shallow defeated eyes and the lines of triumph in spirit around her face. Her brow bones made her face look hollow in the cheeks and eyes, and her skin was tinted a pale yellow. He wondered if she had evolved differently or was just sick. He liked to believe in the first often.

"Vermin."

Her abrasiveness made him think of his wife as her spit hit his face. The crowd became hyenas in frenzy and golden lions launched into action, claws and teeth bared. He saw the woman beaten to the ground with a single baton to the back of the head, her weak bones fractured and rendering her unmoving on the ground. Then it was a free-for-all, scrambling and screaming as her teeth were kicked in, her ribs broken and her body mauled. Gush; the river ran a deep, copper tasting red.

There was never a chance. Not in hell.