The smell of burning flesh awakens me.
"Dad! Dad!" I'm screaming now. There's blood rushing to my head. I feel like I fell asleep on solid rock. "Dad, there's a fire—!"
I'm not in my bed. I'm in the middle of a cave with a strange girl cooking... black hearts... inside of a portable oxygen cooker. She smiles at me, with teeth that almost looks pointed. A Fos. Her eyes are snowy white, with a pasty, watery type of shine to them. She looks like her skin is made of sparkly dust. With the exception of two rosy cheeks, her skin is whiter than the landscape of the Void.
"I'm not your Dad." She says. "Stupid animal."
She leans down to examine a heart at the end of her stick. She pokes it through and flinches as a drop of blood quickly turns into crystal, sizzling under the tiny fire she's created. Darcelle... Callum... Vide... where are they now? I don't see their bodies but I can imagine where their hearts are. The savage has two pots, one of what looks like cooked hearts, and the other (judging by the large amount of Kurosaphir) uncooked. She spikes one of the cooked ones onto a stick with a free hand and shoves the entire thing into her mouth. I hear a tiny popping, like broken glass, I can only imagine is microscopic Kurosaphir crystals crushing under her teeth.
"My friends!" I'm yelling now. My blood burns. It still burns! It always burns, who am I kidding? But now... my whole head and chest feel like they'll explode any second now. Medicine. I need some. Why couldn't I have just stayed behind? Dying of starvation is much better than dying as someone else's food. The strange girl snaps her neck around to look at me. "...What did you do with them?"
She stabs another heart, this time with a knife, and sticks it straight into her mouth.
"...Their remains?"
She smiles. "You're a curious animal. I admire curiosity. I also admire fear. Do you realize how many Lumière I've seen who'd rather fight with their bare hands than except death? All you did was stand there. It's a curious thing. You're friends weren't as accepting as you." She slides the knife across her throat and closes her eyes for a moment before opening them. Those hollow, unfeeling, soulless eyes. "Oh yeah, and you threw up."
She has the heart shaped face of a child. A child about my age, maybe a bit older, maybe nineteen or twenty. Her white hair brushes her shoulders, and her already emphasized eyes appear even larger by her bangs and petite nose. I've never really seen a savage before that didn't look malnourished or dead. The school had savages— Fos ready for children to kill in training, but they were small, weak, brittle creatures that would die regardless of who killed them in a matter of days once their body finally ran out of food and their stomachs ate themselves. This Fos looks pretty almost.
She looks at me as if waiting for a response. Almost. "...What are you going to do with me?"
She stops chewing on the stick with the black heart and grins like a banshee. "Nothing for a while, but I assure you, you won't have long to wonder. You'll be joining your friends soon, I promise." She puts the stick she's been eating off of down, and returns to burning the remaining black hearts over the fire. My blood boils hotter with every pop of the Kurosaphir under the heat.
She sees me trembling. My hands are twitching, I have a massive headache, and I'm pretty sure I've bitten my lip off. I'm not exactly much different from a malnourished Fos at the moment.
Well... besides the fact I'm not a murderer or a damned bastard of that race.
"You really are quite curious. How on earth have you survived so long? That insistent twitching— it's almost painful to watch. As in I almost feel bad for you!" She finishes cooking and shuffles around the pots. By now, she's piled one of them high with black, gooey hearts straight off the portable burner. I almost feel hungry, but the colors wrong. It's a disgusting color. Not white... black... I'm not a murderer, and I sure as hell am not a cannibal.
Look at me! So hungry that even these hearts smell faintly sweet.
"It was my first hunt." I say.
She laughs. "Oh course, of course!" My eyebrows furrow as she gives a soft clap. Is this really a Fos? The same type of savage they train children to kill and eat? "Congratulations. I'm honestly impressed you survived long enough to make it to a cave this far."
Her eyes are white, like looking into water or staring at the Void through a glass shard. She looks almost like a ghost.
"I'm honestly impressed I've survived long enough to have this conversation. Aren't you going to murder me? ...Why are you waiting to end it? There's no—" I tremble at the word, "—Honor is such a thing."
"I'm not going to murder you!" She smiles, her teeth caked in inky stygian blue blood. "But my sister will." She pauses, taking her metal jar filled with cooked hearts and slides a third of them into a mason jar. "Honor. Always Lumière and honor. What good is honor anyway?" She takes the other two jars besides her and fills them up.
My blood's burning. The oxygen's killing me slowly. "—There's more of you?"
She looks at me with confusion, then gives the same eerily persistent smile. "Not here. Of course not. But, I think you're weak enough for her to end. Probably at least. I've never seen a Fos throw up at the sight of blood before! Just how do you live with yourself?"
Am I supposed to answer that?
My blood's boiling! BOILING! OH GOD! CAN SHE SEE THE PAIN I'M IN? Ash always said I wore my pain on my sleeve.
"God, what's wrong with you. I promise you have a few days to pray to whatever false creator you believe in."
BOILING! IT'S FREAKING BOILING!
"...You're not going to throw up again, are you?"
"I'm in... I'm in a lot of..." I can't even stand up anymore. My legs give way and suddenly I'm staring at her cold, dead eyes from the floor.
"GET UP." She demands. There's a sword right next to her.
I stand.
"Good. I just wanted to do this the easy way, you know?"
Quickly, before I can blink, she jabs two fingers into my throat.
THAT'S WHERE. THE HEART. IS. OH. GOD.
YOU ARE READING
Tatemae
Fantasy"Death, I think I could handle. It's the waiting that kills me." Humanity is no more. Struggling out of the rubble are the Lumière and the Fos, two races whose only edible source of food is the hearts of one another, and no matter how much they eat...
