Calm; Decay Volume 1: Who Killed Cock Robin?

5 - Old Snake, New Bird - 5

It was becoming harder for Ashra to see.

From the moment life had left Douglas Swallow's eyes, the play had continued without Ashra having any input as to its direction. Some deep, stirring part of himself had arrested control, walking away with his character into the final act.

Already wracked with emotion, Ashra had felt something pass out of himself into the boy without any conscious effort to do so. The boy had doubled over with pain, bubbling up more guilty heat into Ashra's lungs. The cold presence inside him had stirred for a second time. It had been dark, strange, and hungry. Ashra had been fighting to hear his father's words up until the moment the seedy man's knife found his fleshy neck. The hot, crimson blood landing on his face had been the trigger. Ashra's mind froze into crystalline patterns—the black and white reality setting off a chain reaction.

All turned to blue.

For one beautiful moment of solace the unfamiliar ice stirred to life, stretching into Ashra's limbs, bending him as he relinquished control to its gentle fingers. Ashra did not have to think—he could watch, separate from a world where the only family he had ever known had been taken from him. He was only a spectator as his body took a great leap towards the knife-wielding man. Some rational part of Ashra knew he must have slipped from lucidity—driven from reality by grief or insanity. After all, his body could not spring through the air like this, nor were his arms long enough to reach a man's throat from that range.

Ashra was surprised, but only dully, when his teeth closed around the man's neck. The taste of blood, not his own, had a strange flavor—thin and rich all at the same time. It was intoxicating, the control and power leeching from the man in one swoop of seized authority. That authority answered every question, left no room for compromise, and imbued Ashra with a new, thirsty hope.

I can fight.

He would win. That was a fact—whatever personality he had surrendered to was strong enough to take down every last one of these evil men, strong enough to make them pay.

The men scattered. It was not until his teeth failed to lock around the next throat that Ashra noticed the mist. His vision, so singularly focused until this moment, finally found the opaque shroud on the riverbank that had been absent before the turn.

The men had fled, and in their haste for survival had abandoned the boy. Alone and overwhelmed, the child began crying. The blood thirst fought with Ashra, wrestling with the sight of his still-living victim.

It's his fault. If he hadn't grabbed you.

He's a child.

He's one of them.

Your father would be alive.

There are consequences.

The indecision sent pain through Ashra's spine, rippling up his vertebrae to expose the core of himself to the cold air. This personality did not like to think. Every second that it stopped was another that it grew hungrier.

Why is it cold?

The decision was made for Ashra when a streak of metal came flying at him through the wispy veil. It was only the movement of the fog, a shift in the air that foreshadowed the attack. The deadly chain whipped past Ashra's face, crackling inches short of his right eye. Ashra's jolting response threw him off-balance, leaving him to be caught full in the chest as the knee of the a black-suited man crushed the air from his lungs. Ashra was sent flying, the impact of the assault tossing him airborne. Cold seized Ashra with the returned spike of adrenaline. Self-pity wiped from his mind, Ashra fell into the automatic motions of survival, catching the ground on too-long fingers and feet, ready for the next attack.