Author Games Compilation [Cycle 1]

Task 7 - America's Creation (R13)

WINTER REVOLUTION - SEMIFINALS 

It boiled up to something new the day he came to the gates of something unlike a sanctuary and unlike a hell.

He'd known all along where he'd been headed, and that never changed, despite how his drive to get there did. It'd became more than a mere want, more than a desire; it'd become a need just as essential as the water strapped to his hip and the ashen air filtering through his lungs. It was a pull in his chest, all the tiny hooks tugging gently until they had him within a close enough distance to yank him forward and out of the water.

He felt scaly. Those wrinkles on his hands were filled to an overflowing brim of grime, and the creases on his forehead were all clogged up with dried grease. He was too tired to fight against the clogs to wince, and he was too done with using his hands to do anything more with them than leave them dangling at his sides as he hobbled across the blackened plains, alone.

It hadn't been that way an hour ago. Or was it an hour? Perhaps only twenty minutes, maybe forty, possibly even ten. The numbers, they blended; the numbers, they died off, the meaning died off. But nonetheless, some time ago, he hadn't been alone. They'd scattered much like flies when Lowerings came for bodies on the streets, like the maggots that wormed their ways out of corpses when they failed to be sufficient enough for even the nastiest of creatures. Zaccary'd called his attackers Barbarians - then he'd fallen between the brush.

There was no sign of any other. Not when he looked left, not when he looked right. The sky gave way to a dark grey fog the further he looked out, so there quite possibly was someone else heading the same direction as he.

He did not go looking.

The hooks dragged him forward. At first he could see the dark silver between the fog, then the little honeycomb holes, and then he was rising up, his legs straightening despite the blistering on his heels. He squinted; he reached; he gasped a breath.

His fingers twined through the holes in the gates, curling around the thin twists of metal to meet his palms. It was a burning sort of cold. He pressed in deeper. An inhale. An exhale. If he glanced up he could see the beacon - he knew what was there, but he didn't know what was there.

Silence. A whistle between a bar, maybe. Lifted ash.

Silence.

He forced his throat into action. "I've walked a long time."

Crunching - but a soft crunching. Like shoes over pillows, he could hear the scrape and dip of walking. They emerged from the fog with their faces smudged in detail, like they'd already had dirt on their faces and decided to make images out of it. Some were bald, some had tangled beards, some had their hair all twisted up in dreadlocks. They wore fur upon their shoulders and hides across their stomachs; it all trembled as they approached the other side of the gates.

Reuben's eyes were peeled open as he waited with his cheeks pressed to the frigid metal. The group stopped a foot or two before they came to the actual gates. A straight line of them filled out until they disappeared into the fog again, all horizontal so they could see him.

He thought maybe they were waiting for him to explain, and so he offered the simplest of statements he could, pulling his face away from the gate.

"My name is Reuben. I come from toxum Cosmet 4, and my group was attacked coming here."

They did not show an inkling of expression in their faces as they watched him.

He swallowed thickly. "Let me in. Please."

They stared.

An uneasiness filled him; he pulled his fingers free of the honeycombs and trailed them along the gate as he took a few steps to the left.

The eyes followed him in unison.

He then limped his way over to the right.

Again, they watched, expressionless, emotionless.

Reuben came back to where he'd stood to begin with. It was with indignation he said, loudly, "Who are you?"

A woman in the middle, her blonde hair half shaved, half pulled into a system of matted braids, spoke. All features aside from her mouth remained as stoic and stuff as the rest of her.

"We are the Darlings."

Reuben stumbled back a few feet, splaying his arms out around him to keep balance. His brain took with him an image of a little girl sitting between thorny brush; her voice was small and choked with a white collar. "Kill your Darlings before they kill you," she'd said.

He focused in on the collection opposing him again. They had not moved, and, frankly, he wasn't even too sure they were breathing. It was his mind playing tricks on him, he knew, but then again, he wasn't too sure his mind was even capable of conjuring up such vivid things through the cloud of exhaustion.

His cheeks finally made an effort to wrinkle and squinch; he took a few clumsy steps back and turned away from the faces that zeroed in on the back of his head. His lips smacked each other, he breathed heavily. Noises pulled themselves from his throat in the form of names. There was a pressure behind each syllable. "Froggy!" he called. He took a few more lumbering steps back into the plains. "Carver!"

His next few steps resulted in his foot getting all caught up in some gooey root, and then he was tumbling, his fists punching the dirt and his chest getting all thumped on til the air was all out. He sucked in once; "Tarek?" And then it came out again, and he was left panting against the charred earth. "Sweet?" he whispered. "Callista?"

No one answered, not the beholders of the names, not the Darlings. No one.

He buried his face in the ash.

Had Lowell been present, he'd have been tugging and prodding all over his grandfather's back. But, had Lowell been present, Reuben still would've refused to get up, for if Lowell were present, he'd be a constant stream of you'regivingupwhyareyoujustgivingupisthiswhatyoudideveryothertimesomethingbadcameyourwayyoujustgaveup?

Reuben would get up in his own time, with his own will; it wasn't long before he grew tired of breathing in chunks of dirt and finally sat up, then evolved to a stand.

And then he didn't know where he was to go.

"Kill your Darlings before they kill you."

He looked back to the gates, once. The collection was still there, watching him. He needed to rid himself of their eyes. So long as they saw him, he could feel the sweat coiling down in beads, he could feel the sickly ache in his marrow, his throat was raw. He walked for some time, until the fog had covered up his backside, and even then he did not stop moving.

Deep into the plains he swept, and when he stopped, he had no recollection of which way he was to turn in order to find his way back until he saw that angelic white in the sky. He kept it at his back as he fell upon his knees, scraping away dirt and collecting up little objects that were always caught a few inches underground. It was mindless, really, how he dug up little scraps of metal, how he picked up branches far from lost trees, how he went to sharpening the tips of wood. He was no longer his own entity, but a person floating above his own body, watching down. It was a curious detachment; he presumed he'd been hit with something airborne to make him so rotten in the brain.

He was rotting. Just as surely as the branch in his hands was going to fall apart the moment it met someone else's chest, he was rotting. He no longer saw something wrong with a frustrated murder, for he was going to

"Kill my Darlings before they kill me." 

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