Sigils of Lust - Part One of Chapter One
Snow. Lurien could see the snow, but not exactly feel it. Nor the flames
which rose sharply against the gray wintry sky. Nor the bitter winter
wind driving ash against his skin, fumes into his eyes.
Something precious had been lost.
In that car, that perfectly awful looking sedan with a white door that did
not match the rest of the red exterior, people were screaming. Howling.
Such a terrible, clattering, unseemly noise. Was that the sound, Lurien
wondered, the sound of burning to death? How long would it go on like
this? How long until their lungs gave out? How long until the pain was
just too much?
A hand beating against glass. Glass shattering. Bloody palm. Bloody
wrist.
Lurien tilted his head. The faces in the wrecked car were familiar, even
all dirty and bloody like that. But, he found it difficult to place
them. Someone he had known once? A friend of a friend? An enemy he had
punished too long ago? They looked so...desperate. Did they all look so
desperate when they died? He couldn't remember.
In the last seconds, would they cling to each other? Or would they be
locked too tightly within their own pain, their own loss, to even
recognize anything outside of themselves?
Glass. Glass. Shards of glass. Lurien squatted on the old road and
picked up one of the shards. Shiny and smooth, with a mix of blood, and
dirt, and snow.
And fragile. So very...fragile. And if he could just taste...
Without thinking, he flicked his tongue out to try to understand the
glass. Parse it. Make it somehow fit into a reality. He could -see- his
tongue touch the glass, a dark muscle with forked prongs at the end,
undulating wetly, as only a tongue can do. The length of his own tongue
surprised him more than the sharpness of the glass, and the warm metal
taste of his own blood.
"Only you would sit around eating glass while people were dying in front
of your very eyes."
The sudden presence behind Lurien felt like a magnet. Like it was tugging
not only at his flesh, but at the entire world, trying to inhale all of
the air, absorb the road, drink Lurien's flesh right off his bones. It
pulled. It pulled so hard that even if Lurien wanted to continue watching
the people in the car burn to death, he couldn't.
"Who...are you?"
This man was...? No, not a man. His lower legs were inverted like some
sort of mythological satyr. They were covered not in fur, but remarkably
shiny leather boots, fitted to the strange shape. The rest of his body
was abnormally sleek, with a long nude torso sporting hundreds of
red sigil-shaped tattoos, and only a thin black kilt keeping him from
being what one might call...indecent. There was something equally
disturbing about his bald head, not the lack of hair save for the
singular braid at the back, but the two, twisted, metal-black horns which
rose from it. Lurien noticed all of this in the bare instant before he
met the man's eyes. Black eyes. Horrible eyes which made him shiver and
suffer a pang of crippling loneliness so intense, he didn't even realize
he'd grabbed a handful of glass and was crushing it in his palm, in a
vain and desperate attempt to feel anything...anything else.
"Don't be an idiot, you useless piece of shit," the creature said. Ah,
but the sweetness in that voice. A salve. A balm. It promised so much
relief, despite the cutting words. "Get off the ground, spit out that
glass, and greet me properly."
Something broke behind Lurien. Maybe the car exploded. Maybe the people
finally gasped their last and died. It was no longer really all that
important. Without even thinking, he threw himself at the horned
creature, managing to catch one misshapen leg with his dirty hands. He
clung to it, clutched it like it might be the only anchor in a maelstrom.
He pressed his face against a kilted thigh and inhaled. It smelled like
burning and sex and food and home and terror.
"Take me home. Take me home. Please, please..." Lurien had no idea if
the creature could hear him, considering he had his lips pressed so firmly
against the boots he could taste them. "Please, I need to... Be where
you are...go where you go... I don't care who you are, just please..."
The creature sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose in annoyance.
"They really fucked you up." With a single hand, he lifted Lurien so
effortlessly, it looked like the boy might have been a plush doll. "How
irritating. Now I have to practically start over from the beginning."
"...the beginning?" It was just an echo of a question, barely even there.
"Shut up. Your voice is grating." The creature harrumphed,
summarily tapped a long talon-like fingernail to the back of Lurien's
head, and the boy passed out.