Inchoate Blood (CRUX I)

1. Death, Voice ≁

    The word haunts me. Death. It haunts me non-stop. Death. And I hate how it takes control of my sanity.

     Fuck it. I take an overloaded mouthful of alcohol and set the thick glass on the table. Probably my third glass today, is it? I can't remember. Everything in my mind is a haze of grey flashes. I touch off my cigarette butt on the ashtray and take a breath through the smoke. Grey flashes. Grey smoke. What else is grey? Jett's face before he died, that's what. I feel myself clench a fist as I hit the wooden table hard, not for the first time that day. The glass of beer wobbles on the unsteady table.

    Damn, it hurts. The skin on my knuckles looks like they are already peeling from continuous impacts. It hurts like ripping off a piece of my limb, a piece of my body. He died and that's what he left me. An empty void in which he was always meant to fill. An open wound just for him left raw and painful. Why did he have to leave me in such a damn mess? My sanity chipped away at the very memory of him, taking my anguish and shaping it into hatred.

    But I'm delusional. I hate a dead person. He doesn't know I hate him. Because he's dead. He's fucking dead, moron. The screams deafen my ears.

    I claw my fingers through my dirty unkempt hair. It was filthy from days without a wash. I was filthy, from days of disgusting cigar and alcohol. How long has it been? A week? A week since he got murdered. A week since I've lost my sanity. And how long will it be before I find it? I'm stupid. I don't want to find it. I don't want to be sane, that's why. It's far too painful to be sane. It's better if I'm stupid.

    Looking at my red knuckles, I flash the metal ring on my index finger in the sunlight. It is almost dark, twilight one might say, with the fading orange sun streaming its remaining light through the window. There was a point in time when I admired the ring. because it was something I made myself a very long time ago. Now I don't even recall where I had found inspiration for the twisted alluring vine that decorated the metal band. Ivy, huh. Beautiful but some are deadly poisonous. Perhaps there was a girl named Ivy then.

    Slowly I remove the ring and a sense of bareness strikes me around my finger. It was a ring I never took off, partially because drift rings are never supposed to be taken off in the first place. Unless the other pair is lost, at least, like mine is now. Drift rings are special rings that alchemists use to communicate with each other, one of those things that give alchemists self-pride in possessing because it indicates that you belong to a greater group.

    Jett had suggested it when we were both still studying in the academy, bright-eyed and ready to graduate as apprentice alchemists. To believe we were even excited to face the horrors of real-life alchemy, I can't help but scoff bitterly at all these memories buried inside my drift ring. Like a beautiful piece of broken, scrap metal, barely worth a single nickel now that its pair is missing, our ambitions are worthless without each other to fulfil them.

    Yet I still hear his voice in my ears, haunting me sometimes, refusing to be carried away by the wind of time. I heard his words when he secretly stole his father's drift ring one day to bring to the academy to show me. "Trust me when I say I know how to use this thing," he had said, beaming with child's pride. "It works like long-distance telepathy, well least that's what my dad told me. I see him use it all the time. He says every alchemist has one when they work in a group or with a partner. And we promised we'd be alchemic partners, right Cruz?"

    Yeah right. Partner? More like the one you betrayed and abandoned.

    Something hot blurs my field of vision and my fists tremble again with anger, subsiding into poisonous agony at the back of my throat. How cruel do you have to be to leave someone like this- a corpse barely living, feeding on self-agony and hatred, wishing the death of himself and the murderer making him suffer this way. My life has no meaning without his presence. I don't think I can live much longer anymore. This pit of hatred and insanity will soon take hold of my life. And by then, I will only be able kill, in frantic hope to silence these ghosts in my head.

    I circle the ring around my fingers wearily, twirling it back and forth in my hand. I start to feel dreadfully faint in the head. My vision slowly sways with my throbbing heart beat and my fingers collide with each other, numb and slack without coordination. The ring falls out of my loose grip and rolls across the wooden table, falling as it reaches the edge.

    The sound of the ring tinkling as it hits the tile floor sounds like a melody in my ears. It rolls around in circles, becoming quieter as it settles down. My eyelids feel heavy and I lose sight of it underneath the table. I close my empty palms and clutch tightly onto thin air, onto the remnants of every presence of Jett. Maybe I can end my own life this way. Maybe if I died, I wouldn't have to live with this knife of agony cutting my heart every time I thought about him.

    Darkness floods my vision as I feel my head thud hard on the wooden table. As I stared into a black empty space, I hear a hazed static voice speak into my mind. Am I hallucinating? I hear it somehow making out my name.

    "Cruz, Cruz..." It is an unfamiliar woman's voice.

    Gravity weigh my eye lids down as I try to pry them open. Who is calling my name? Where is it coming from? No, no, it couldn't possibly be...

    A shard of ice pierces my spine awake, as I slowly realised the impossible. I scramble off my chair and, as I thought, not far away from the table's leg I see my own drift ring burning red ever so slightly. Its engraved runes blare a soft tawny light, and I can feel its soft quintessence energy fading into the hanging cold air. It was burning because someone had used its power to speak to me. Someone who is possession of Jett's drift ring.

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