Breed and Burn: Skinless

chapter 1- death must be bored

Light had descended but that did not stop Faceless from gawking at Axel from behind the bars. It took Axel a while to recognise that they slept when the light fell across The Underneath. Nothing majestic rose out of the darkness, out of the silent charcoal curtain that was night. Just rodents and the skeletons of trees. He wasn't sure where the light came from because even the sun and moon had betrayed him. They were not warm golden rays that was able to lift spirits but callous and transparent like gauze. Even when the world was drowning in grief and angst, the sky remained beautiful in an eerie way.

Save the stretches of rotten flesh and bone that Faceless threw at him daily and the spots of his blood that stained the weathered stone ground, the cage was naked. Utterly exposed to the enemy. To them, he was an animal and meant to feel as such. Even the cloth that was tied around his middle had been snatched away, subjecting him to utter humiliation, vulnerability.

It left him in a wreckage where he was his own poison.

When he was first thrown into the cage, Axel cried as if the ferocity of it might bring his friends back, like the sheer force of his grief would undo everything that went wrong.

Why did they hate him so much? There had not been a moment where a Faceless was not peering into the cage and hissing at his naked body with a starvation in its eyes. Some of the Faceless he recognised as doppelgangers of some of the boys from the carriage and that fueled a different type of anger in him. Anger from betrayal. As time crept on, he could not help wondering if he really was the bad guy.

As soon as a Faceless caught sight of him, strings would release a lifetime's worth of pent up emotion. When Axel looked into their eyes there would be such a raging storm of emotion, Axel couldn't identify one. Their souls were poisoned completely with hatred.

Surrounding the cage was an abandoned funfair- the very same one that Axel had seen when revisiting forgotten memories. Although in the horizon, he could make out black outlines of rickety rollercoasters and helter-skelters, other cages remained beside his enclosure. They were bare like his but much filthier from years of neglect. Somehow, Faceless managed to find the decency in them to clean his cage out before he was dragged into it. As each day passed, Axel stared willfully at the empty cages and waited for someone to inhabit them. No one ever came. There had been a day in which Axel had been thrown into his cage, knocking him out.

When he awoke, his vision was blotted with an inky marrow and something intercepted his conscience. Something stripped away his sense of self and when he looked in the cage he saw something that took his breath away. It made him press his face against the bars and clutch the bars until it knuckles turned white.

At first, all he could focus on were golden, padded paws crossing back and forth the cage opposite his. When he squinted his eyes, they faded. Alarmed, he refocused his gaze. It took him a moment to realise the blanket was actually a large, shaggy mane. Once more, the darkness stole it before Axel could examine it any further. In a distant world, he could hear pitiful laughs. Although he did everything to stop Faceless from mocking him and he knew this was another plan devised by The Things to ridicule him, he could not smother his curiosity. An innocent, child like wonder took over his mind.

After he squeezed his eyes shut, he found himself staring at eyes of polished stones which were large and rimmed, a broad nose and a flash of a pink tongue. It let out a small roar. He could not believe his eyes. It was a lion. Mouth agape, he felt tears slid down his check. There was a beam of light that flashed across his soul, ridding of all the negative emotions that had clawed inside of him and claiming it as its own. He hadn't realised he had missed happiness this much.

The lion was in every child's favourite storybook; he remembered that much. But they were only a creature of the past. They had been extinct since 2050 and along with it every other beloved story book character. At once, the light was replaced with darkness. An unwavering guilt consumed him. Although he was born long after the extinction of lions, he felt like he was part of the fault- especially in a world where he seemed to be the only human.