Breed and Burn: Skinless

chapter 5- slaughter the devil

When the blindfold was removed, Axel found himself alone in the dome. He was standing in a large, empty rectangular room. It was about the area of three football pitches. In the center, there were four, rose wood walls which made up a generous room. The door was short enough that he would need to duck before entering it.

Shaking, Axel walked towards the closest wall of the dome. Beside each wall there was about a hundred seats all occupied by Faceless. On further inspection, he realised that although their bodies faced the dome, their heads had completed twisted behind them. How had their necks not snapped?

His mind grew darken subsiding in the tinder he had once become.

The first thing to shift were their eyes, their beautiful, hostile blue, grey eyes made of glass. Each pair of eyes rested on Axel.

Snapping like brittle glass, he wished to look away but found he was unable to. He understood why they had turned the other way. It was to save him of their own misfortune.

They had no skin, at least not on their faces. Instead, there was a confined mass of pale pink and beige muscles. The lines that separated each muscle were thin and the colour of slaughter.

Axel remembered what Seven had said about Faceless unable to stand their own faces. He shuddered at the thought of them knifing their own skin of. There must've been a potion that prevented the healing and prohibited infection similar to the Lysander.

Hate was the devil's path and Faceless had left its ash strewn surface covered in footprints. There was nothing that was worth the corruption of the soul that hate induced yet Faceless lived in it. If they were not hating humans, they were hating their own appearance. Something flashed beneath Axel's hardened eyes. Pity.

Aside from Braedon, every Faceless Axel had encountered either had no facial expression or no skin. If he was about to witness a Faceless' expression change because of its human doppelganger, it would bury his head in the dirt and wail. Or it would shove its face in a makeshift bag made of human and Faceless innards, cowering in shame.

Things like that actually made him feel sorry for them. This was no life. He noticed a much smaller Faceless in the crowd, swinging it's legs since they didn't reach the ground. It didn't seem to care that no one else was moving. A lump grew in the back of his throat. No matter how hard he swallowed, it would not go away. It felt like a marble and the more he swallowed the more his throat hurt.

The Faceless child's eyes were blue too. At this thought, Axel felt something rise like smoke through the pipe. His mother had told him the colour of a werewolf's eye became steel blue after it killed an innocent.

The Faceless child flashed a smile at him for the tiniest moment.

Turning away, Axel was reminded of the room that was placed in the center the dome. Not knowing what else to do, he approached it. Before he stepped through the doorway, he closed his eye and as he plunged into a darkness that didn't seem so dark anymore, horrible imaginings of what was in the room filled his mind spiderlike.

What greeted him was not what he expected. It was just a bathroom. Sighing a sigh of relief, he closed the door behind him. It was what he expected, functional with no frills or comforts.

Hastily, he stripped and stepped into the shower, toes flinching against the rough, cold tiles. He didn't care how cold the water was or how it was slightly tinged with grey. Although he took care over the particularly painful bruises and wounds, he scoured himself vigorously. So much dirt and grime had built on his skin over the year.

Although he had tried to brush out the knots in his blood-stained hair whilst in the cage, his patience had dwindled and his mind became shreds. His hair was no longer silky but coarse and several shades darker. Some parts even formed the beginning of dreadlocks. He had noticed a pair of scissors on the counter and decided once he was done with his shower and attempting to comb through as many as the knots with his fingers, he would cut out the unsalvageable pieces. Pouring an excess amount of shampoo straight onto his scalp, he rubbed furiously at his hair. Whilst wet, it was close to brushing his shoulders.

As he watched the grimy water go through the drain, he wished he could strip away the heavy feelings on his bones like he was stripping away the layers of dirt.

The heaviness was in his mind as much as it was in his bones. Stupidly, he thought an outward clean would fix the insides. Instead, his own eyeballs felt too heavy for their sockets. He thought about the dying ember of hope and how Faceless had brought a cold, howling wind. Although he felt like crying, there was no tears left in him. There was nothing left.

After shampooing and rinsing his hair three times and rubbing soap on his body and rinsing five times, he found it in him to leave the shower. Although he knew that a deteriorated hygiene wouldn't effect his mental stability, he had hoped it was the cause of this weight that refused to let go. Much to his misery, he was wrong.

He had combed through as much as his hair as he could but failed to get rid of all the knots. Using the scissors, he cut out the larger knots, finding satisfaction in the throaty crunch. As the hair fell to the floor, he realised how subconsciously he was avoiding his face in the mirror.

Hoping that the Faceless had damaged his face beyond perfection, he gave in. He didn't give in because he was weak but because he hadn't seen himself in a year. What had changed? Was his face all that bad? Perhaps he had created an illusion in his head of what he looked like that burned away reality. The more he thought about, the more he realised he could hardly remember what he looked like.

As it should be, he told himself.

He stepped through the door. Fear of the unknown groped him. What kind of hell was he going to walk into? Something seized him by the neck. A façade of white replaced his surroundings.

Cheers filled the overwhelming silence.