Darkness lurks beneath the surface of society, something that has been growing and devouring the innocent for decades. Luna Aurion stumbles on a human farm under the streets of a supposedly peaceful human city, but before she can report back, she is...
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Rush stood in a wasteland he well knew, and a shiver ran down his spine as memories that he'd thought long since gone resurfaced. Corpses surrounded him, and he took an uneasy step back as a body buried in others reached for him and moved its jaw but no words came out. How could they with the open boils festering on their lips and neck? The air wreaked of death and sickness, and so many perished every day that they just stacked up the bodies and burned them. There was no saving the sick human who was begging silently for help at his feet.
There had never been saving any of them.
Rush found a younger version of himself where he remembered, struggling with a few guards as they dragged his mother away to the heap of flesh. He had been so small then, barely a boy. Fists flailing, he tried to fight the man who held him, but he'd been so skinny, so malnourished and weak because his mother had been too sick to provide. For the months that she'd suffered, he'd lived on scraps, bringing her water and some overripe fruit that was soft enough for her to eat in her weakness. All he'd left for himself had been hard stale bread and plants he hadn't been entirely sure were edible.
"Let me go!" his younger voice echoed, so much higher pitched than he remembered.
The man certainly had let him go. He'd fallen face first into muck, and when he'd rolled to pick himself up, he'd found himself face to face with a young girl's decaying face. As a human, he'd pissed himself too many times. Rush rubbed his face as he was forced to watch himself scramble back to the guards' feet and scream as they tossed his mother onto the pile of nameless humans who no one cared enough to bury.
The second guard pulled out his sword, and he squealed and backed away from them. If he hadn't already pissed himself from the dead human, he'd have done it again. It was painful to watch how weak he'd been as such a filthy human had turned to gut him. Humans normally at least hesitated when killing children, but not this one. The other man had stopped him, grabbing his hand and telling him to sheath his sword.
"The boy is contaminated," the soulless garbage protested, fighting with his sword hand.
"Look at him. He'll starve by the week's end or succumb to the illness. There is no reason to bloody your blade or smear your conscience on such a kill," the kinder one said, and the garbage humph'd and sheathed his blade.
They left him there. In a field of corpses.
And he'd slept there. Climbing a pile of corpses, flesh peeling off as his fingers found purchase in the skulls and bones of the fallen to reach his mother. It was sick to watch as an adult, but he'd known so little as a child, seen so much death that it had not meant much to him to trample on the dead. All he'd wanted was to curl up in his mother's arms once more.
