The Last City

Prologue

Prologue

This is the story of a man who died twice (draft 12)

Dalenis Trey cried and wiped the tears from his eyes as he took a bite of the flesh. The young woman was still breathing but in shock, staring blindly to the sky as she lay on the black ground. The wound in the woman's arm gushed blood as he carved more flesh from her bone with his little fishing knife, a hefty chunk this time. At least he wasn't barbaric about it, he thought as he prepared to take another piece. It would be enough to sedate the hunger growing like a festering retched disease inside him. He could feel the fresh life of their victim already taking effect as he chewed and swallowed. He tasted nothing, it was not a feast to tickle the pallet or enrage the tongue, it was a stinging metallic glob of flesh he forced down his throat.

One of his kind knelt down beside him as he chewed on the bloody meat and took a bite out of her shoulder. The woman let out a silent scream, a bubble of blood formed on her lips and popped almost instantly. He watched the terror in her eyes as the Withered feasted on the hot blood flowing from her wounds. The hot liquid flowed from her ragged gashes and over the woman's pale skin. The blood soaked into the ground at least giving sustenance to the dead vegetation where she lay. He always wondered about the eyes, they seemed pleading but anguish was so hard to discern from those who had no hope of survival. Tears often flowed from their eyes as they died, eaten alive as they must do. Eaten slowly and carefully the withered must sustain as much life in the body as possible before it edges over into the darkness.

Another ripped open her gut, spewing entrails over the forest floor. The slave struggled as the teeth gnawed and tore at her skin, her hands flailing wildly. She fought at what was to come inevitably; there was no escaping the death that she was being given. Her body would be consumed to give life to others and she would in death finally understand why it had to be done. She will personally experience the darkness that awaits all living things in death. A silence and madness that filled eternity that he had risen from filled his eyes. He watched the woman struggle against the hoard that ate from her body; she raised her hand begging to be forgiven for whatever she had done, as if calling out to the gods that watched from above. She didn't know he was the only one watching and there were no gods, not in this place and not in the life that awaited beyond death. Her cries and pleas didn't sway her attackers as they tore her arm from her body.

Dalenis took another bite of flesh and it stung his lips; the taste was putrid. The Withered had all the senses and faculties of any living and that is why it made this so hard. He felt the guilt of what he has done but it was only fleeting. He had to keep living and this is what it took to survive the curse placed on them. He didn't choose this existence; he woke up from his watery grave for a purpose. Perhaps it was redemption or vengeance that bought him back. He never knew, there were no gods to tell him how or why because the afterlife was silent. He returned scratching and clawing at the ground with a scream in his decayed throat, his eye buldging out his skull and is tongue swollen. In his first moments he felt what he felt in death, the stinging and horrid pain of drowning as the water filled his lungs. It was like a second birth rising from the mud and salty sea.

Before the meal of flesh and bone of the living his body was falling apart before his eyes. Flakes of skin had peeled and cracked, his organs began to shut down as the symptoms of death took its toil in a very short time. He had returned from death and death followed him each night as it struggled to drag him and those like him back its embrace. It would eventually consume him and claim his very body if he did not rejuvenate the very essence of his soul with the life of another, any life from that which slithered on the ground to the living sentient beings that wondered this doomed planet. The blood of the innocent girl on the ground before him flowed into the ground, soaking it up like the rain on a once summer day. Even this world hungered for death as they did.