PT4: The Sun
Title: It's Living
Story Type: PT Original
Wordcount: 2162
Summary: What you are and who you are.
Notes: My take on urban fantasy (one of my favourite genres!) and based slightly on an idea I had when I was re-imagining Twilight the way I would have done it. Apologies for posting late.
It's Living
Here’s the truth, if you want to know.
There’s a reason people like me hate the sun so bad. It ain’t about being sick and twisted creatures of death and despair. It’s not the purity of dawn cleansing the world of our impurity. It’s not so poetic as that. The sun is far to big and far too remote to be that judgemental. Not that we’d deserve it. I mean, just look at vampires. A bit of bad dental work and an unreasonably restrictive diet and all they want to do is pine under the moonlight and write epic poems. The sun doesn’t kill ‘em because they’re supposed to be bad people, it kills them because they’re, well...they’re dead.
That’s what it does, see? The sun, in magical terms, simply has no patience for fabrication. That a vampire can walk and talk and suck the blood from your veins without a pulse, well, that’s just a very convincing lie.
Ghouls aren’t so different. We’re not embodiments of evil so much as we’re free labor. You get summoned, you get assigned, you get to work. It’s not our fault the guys conjuring us into existence tend toward the murderously inclined.
See, a ghoul when he’s sommoned has no thoughts of his own. We’re blank slates. So when the crazy man in the swirly cape fills our heads with instructions to maim, kill, devour, destroy, we’ve got no reason to believe the thoughts aren’t coming from inside us. And the sad fact is, most of us don’t live long enough to figure out the distinction.
‘Cause all we are, at the start of it, is a very convincing lie. So when the sun comes up and finds us, we burn up, or fade to nothing, or dissolve into mist and float away, because a lie as outrageous as we are can only exist in the shady almost-reality of nighttime and shadow.
Now me...I got lucky. A newborn ghoul isn’t so different from a newborn human, just bigger and better coordinated. With claws. My point is, we’re pretty easily distracted once the single-minded focus of our masters starts to fade. And that only takes a few hours. We come out of potentia and into reality with fully formed brains, so they don’t take very long to get with the program. In my case, the program was a dragonfly.
Yep. No inborn sense of right-and-wrong, no twinkling of latent sentience, just a confused and disoriented soldier-monster who just caught a flash of blue-green-purple all at the same time. It caught my attention and made me alter my course enough that the hero with the fire-axe just barely missed embedding his weapon in my skull. By the time he corrected, one of my brothers had attached himself to the guy’s torso and they were a bit too occupied to chase me down.
I followed the dragonfly away from the battle and into a swamp, more luck for me. The canopy was thick enough that all but the most persistent shafts of sunlight were kept at bay. I didn’t come out of it unscathed, though. Ghouls tend to like shiny things, and the sun? Well, the sun pretty much wrote the book on shining, didn’t it?
I still have the scar where it took a chunk out of my arm when I tried to touch it. I immediately scurried to the darkest corner of the swamp and curled up into a ball, waiting for the scary light to go away.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, shivering with cold and abating my hunger with mushrooms and moss. I did a lot of crying, I remember. Both because my arm hurt like hell and because I knew my brothers and sisters couldn’t have survived if they were caught out in the burning light. Even if they had survived the slaughter.
I can’t begin to tell you how horrifying a thing sentience is if you weren’t born to it. To have it slam into you in the course of a few hours, to go from “here is enemy. Kill” to “who am I? Where do I belong? What happens to me now?” over a single evening is about the most traumatising thing I can think of.
Maybe there’s a reason my kind don’t tend to live longer than an hour or two.
I came out of hiding eventually. The battle had been cleaned up in my absence, only a few dark, splotchy stains remained to show anything had happened at all. I was alone, which was a good thing, because back then I looked about how you’d expect: pebbly green-brown skin, bat-like ears, inch-long claws at the end of thin, spidery fingers, and more elbows and knees than any biped should be alloted.
I was hungry.
Don’t get frisky, I don’t mean for people. Ghouls can eat just about anything, so long as it’s digestible. Humans, yes, but also cows, pigs, zebras, fiddler crabs, starfruit, asparagus, dandelions. We’re like humans that way, only we don’t waste any of it. What doesn’t turn into fuel turns into skin, what doesn’t turn into skin turns into cartilege or bone. We store the rest. A well-fed ghoul is a bitch to kill, take it from me.
I followed the smell of food to a massive metal box, what I later learned was a dumpster, and I climbed in to find something to help heal my arm, though years of three-square-meals-a-day haven’t suceeded in repairing all the damage, I at least managed to grow back some of the muscle that had seered away.
I was scared of the burning light’s return, though, so I bundled what I could in my arms and hurried off to find shelter. I found it, whether you belive it or not, in a church. It was an empty shell of a building, about to be torn down and rebuilt into something else. It was my very first home. I found a little room with no holes or glass in the walls and hid away with my haul, eating until I felt sick, then curled up and shivered myself to sleep.
I know, it’s a pretty pathetic way to begin. But it’s gotten better since. I had a few weeks’ safety in that church, venturing out every night to raid the dumpster and hurrying back before dawn to hide away from the sun. Then, of all the luck, I was discovered.
By Fire-axe.
His name was Ambrose, and he was a champion of righeousness, apparently. All I knew was that he was big and angry and holding something both heavy and sharp over my head.
Here’s a fun fact: my first word was “No.”
My second was “please”.
Fire-axe had apparently never seen a monster burst into tears before. Go figure.
One of the scary things that comes with sudden sentience is the terrifying awareness of your own mortality. It’s only slightly less awful than the idea of fairness. It struck me, in that moment, just how unfair it was that I’d done so well for so long, suffered my way through survival for weeks, staving off death with scraps of garbage in a dark corner of a dead building, only to have it end like this. On my knees, begging for my life from the guy I’d narrowly escaped the day I was born.
Ambrose, fortunately for me, actually was a champion of righteousness. And a good man. He still wore bandages over the wounds my brothers had given him that night, and here he was laying down his sword and kneeling on the floor to look at my face.
“I must be out of my mind.” He sighed as he sank to my level. “This is insane.”
“Forgive!” I begged him. “Did not know!”
Ambrose shook his head and peered at me. “Your master is dead, creature.”
I blinked up at him and cocked my head to the side. “Who?”
A line appeared between his eyebrows and he copied my head-tilting. “Um...Malvore? The dark sorcerer? He conjured about twenty of you out of that compost heap?”
I blinked again. “Swirly cape man?”
He laughed at that, then looked surprised. “You didn’t eve know the guy?”
“Not here.” I explained. “Then, pff! Here. Swirly cape man standing like:” I raised my arms high over my head and out to the side and puffed up my chest.
Ambrose laughed harder. “Lord above. That was it?”
I shook my head. “Say things.” I tapped my temple. “Here. Say “fight”. Say “kill”. Say “enemy”.”
As you may have noticed, my vocabulary has vastly improved since then. But Ambrose got the jist.
“Well, that’s...disturbing. I feel a bit...used, knowing that.”
I tilted my head again. I’d seen a dog do it once and it seemed to work. “You?”
Ambrose frowned. “Good point. Um...you live here?”
“Hiding.” I whispered. “Burning light find me, no more here.”
“Oh. The sun, right. You know they’re tearing this place down in a few days, right?”
A sagged at that and nodded.
Ambrose sighed again. “Totally. Insane.” He muttered.
When the sun rose, I was curled up in the bed of Ambrose’s guest bedroom, my greenish skin scrubbed raw and tender after a piping hot bath, with a thick quilt nailed over the window to keep the light out.
The next day I wore clothes for the first time. I felt the touch of a child, Ambrose’s daughter Cynthia, for the first time. I ate fresh, prepared food for the first time. I smiled for the first time, too, when Cynthia gave me a name.
Ellis. Like the Island.
When I was strong and healthy, and when Ambrose’s home and family had come to feel like my own, I began to join him on his missions at night. I hunted monsters and the people who emulated them. I saved the lives of innocent bystanders and comrades alike. Several times, I encountered my own kind, and I would not fight them. I killed their summoners instead. Those who survived, and there were never many, were taken to safe houses.
There are a few of us running around now. Not that you’d know it.
Years went by, and I began to change. I was never hungry anymore, so my body was filling out. I’d always kept my claws trimmed, but over time they grew more slowly, and far less thick. My skin was smoothing, my teeth dulling, and my ears lay more flat.
I began to discover that I could control my body’s construction, and that I was unconciously emulating the humans I lived with. Sandy, Ambrose’s wife, coached me through it, gave me lessons on human anatomy, sat with me to watch documentaries about biology, and kept a detailed chart of my metamorphosis.
We’ve got some theories about this. My personal favorite is that ghouls look like ghouls because that’s what the conjurer thinks they should look like, and in fact it’s the mental image of the body that forms the body. When I became self-aware, that mental image’s source switched to me. Or maybe it happened when Swirly Cape bought it. Either way, I was turning human, and I was giddy about it.
I tried turning into a dog, once. It wasn’t pretty. But I could turn back into my ghoulish form, which was handy for fighting. Even so, I was always relieved to change back into a man. I much preferred the shape I chose to the one forced on me by a man who didn’t care if I lived or died.
Now, here’s the thing about a lie.
If someone believes in it, really believes in the possibility of it, and works hard enough to make it real? It is.
Real enough to fool even the sun.
It took me twelve years. Cynthia was getting ready for college. I stepped onto the porch to see her off. She stood beside the car, damn near as nervous as I was, and held out her arms.
The sun was blinding on my eyes, and I felt the heat of it all along my new, coffee-colored skin, but the heat stayed on the outside of me and I walked the length of the driveway to pull her into my arms and hug the bejeezus out of her. She was crying and laughing at the same time.
I left Ambrose’s house not long after that. Got my license and set up my own agency in town. It’s not a big town, and I don’t do a ton of business, but I help people and Cynthia’s been here ever since she got her diploma, keeping my books in order and my head above water. I don’t have a perfect life. Most months I’m choosing between electricity and rent, and I’ve never been kissed by someone who didn’t wipe away the lipstick with a napkin afterward, but I’m alive.
I am really, really alive.
Story Type: PT Original
Wordcount: 2162
Summary: What you are and who you are.
Notes: My take on urban fantasy (one of my favourite genres!) and based slightly on an idea I had when I was re-imagining Twilight the way I would have done it. Apologies for posting late.
It's Living
Here’s the truth, if you want to know.
There’s a reason people like me hate the sun so bad. It ain’t about being sick and twisted creatures of death and despair. It’s not the purity of dawn cleansing the world of our impurity. It’s not so poetic as that. The sun is far to big and far too remote to be that judgemental. Not that we’d deserve it. I mean, just look at vampires. A bit of bad dental work and an unreasonably restrictive diet and all they want to do is pine under the moonlight and write epic poems. The sun doesn’t kill ‘em because they’re supposed to be bad people, it kills them because they’re, well...they’re dead.
That’s what it does, see? The sun, in magical terms, simply has no patience for fabrication. That a vampire can walk and talk and suck the blood from your veins without a pulse, well, that’s just a very convincing lie.
Ghouls aren’t so different. We’re not embodiments of evil so much as we’re free labor. You get summoned, you get assigned, you get to work. It’s not our fault the guys conjuring us into existence tend toward the murderously inclined.
See, a ghoul when he’s sommoned has no thoughts of his own. We’re blank slates. So when the crazy man in the swirly cape fills our heads with instructions to maim, kill, devour, destroy, we’ve got no reason to believe the thoughts aren’t coming from inside us. And the sad fact is, most of us don’t live long enough to figure out the distinction.
‘Cause all we are, at the start of it, is a very convincing lie. So when the sun comes up and finds us, we burn up, or fade to nothing, or dissolve into mist and float away, because a lie as outrageous as we are can only exist in the shady almost-reality of nighttime and shadow.
Now me...I got lucky. A newborn ghoul isn’t so different from a newborn human, just bigger and better coordinated. With claws. My point is, we’re pretty easily distracted once the single-minded focus of our masters starts to fade. And that only takes a few hours. We come out of potentia and into reality with fully formed brains, so they don’t take very long to get with the program. In my case, the program was a dragonfly.
Yep. No inborn sense of right-and-wrong, no twinkling of latent sentience, just a confused and disoriented soldier-monster who just caught a flash of blue-green-purple all at the same time. It caught my attention and made me alter my course enough that the hero with the fire-axe just barely missed embedding his weapon in my skull. By the time he corrected, one of my brothers had attached himself to the guy’s torso and they were a bit too occupied to chase me down.
I followed the dragonfly away from the battle and into a swamp, more luck for me. The canopy was thick enough that all but the most persistent shafts of sunlight were kept at bay. I didn’t come out of it unscathed, though. Ghouls tend to like shiny things, and the sun? Well, the sun pretty much wrote the book on shining, didn’t it?
I still have the scar where it took a chunk out of my arm when I tried to touch it. I immediately scurried to the darkest corner of the swamp and curled up into a ball, waiting for the scary light to go away.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, shivering with cold and abating my hunger with mushrooms and moss. I did a lot of crying, I remember. Both because my arm hurt like hell and because I knew my brothers and sisters couldn’t have survived if they were caught out in the burning light. Even if they had survived the slaughter.
I can’t begin to tell you how horrifying a thing sentience is if you weren’t born to it. To have it slam into you in the course of a few hours, to go from “here is enemy. Kill” to “who am I? Where do I belong? What happens to me now?” over a single evening is about the most traumatising thing I can think of.
Maybe there’s a reason my kind don’t tend to live longer than an hour or two.
I came out of hiding eventually. The battle had been cleaned up in my absence, only a few dark, splotchy stains remained to show anything had happened at all. I was alone, which was a good thing, because back then I looked about how you’d expect: pebbly green-brown skin, bat-like ears, inch-long claws at the end of thin, spidery fingers, and more elbows and knees than any biped should be alloted.
I was hungry.
Don’t get frisky, I don’t mean for people. Ghouls can eat just about anything, so long as it’s digestible. Humans, yes, but also cows, pigs, zebras, fiddler crabs, starfruit, asparagus, dandelions. We’re like humans that way, only we don’t waste any of it. What doesn’t turn into fuel turns into skin, what doesn’t turn into skin turns into cartilege or bone. We store the rest. A well-fed ghoul is a bitch to kill, take it from me.
I followed the smell of food to a massive metal box, what I later learned was a dumpster, and I climbed in to find something to help heal my arm, though years of three-square-meals-a-day haven’t suceeded in repairing all the damage, I at least managed to grow back some of the muscle that had seered away.
I was scared of the burning light’s return, though, so I bundled what I could in my arms and hurried off to find shelter. I found it, whether you belive it or not, in a church. It was an empty shell of a building, about to be torn down and rebuilt into something else. It was my very first home. I found a little room with no holes or glass in the walls and hid away with my haul, eating until I felt sick, then curled up and shivered myself to sleep.
I know, it’s a pretty pathetic way to begin. But it’s gotten better since. I had a few weeks’ safety in that church, venturing out every night to raid the dumpster and hurrying back before dawn to hide away from the sun. Then, of all the luck, I was discovered.
By Fire-axe.
His name was Ambrose, and he was a champion of righeousness, apparently. All I knew was that he was big and angry and holding something both heavy and sharp over my head.
Here’s a fun fact: my first word was “No.”
My second was “please”.
Fire-axe had apparently never seen a monster burst into tears before. Go figure.
One of the scary things that comes with sudden sentience is the terrifying awareness of your own mortality. It’s only slightly less awful than the idea of fairness. It struck me, in that moment, just how unfair it was that I’d done so well for so long, suffered my way through survival for weeks, staving off death with scraps of garbage in a dark corner of a dead building, only to have it end like this. On my knees, begging for my life from the guy I’d narrowly escaped the day I was born.
Ambrose, fortunately for me, actually was a champion of righteousness. And a good man. He still wore bandages over the wounds my brothers had given him that night, and here he was laying down his sword and kneeling on the floor to look at my face.
“I must be out of my mind.” He sighed as he sank to my level. “This is insane.”
“Forgive!” I begged him. “Did not know!”
Ambrose shook his head and peered at me. “Your master is dead, creature.”
I blinked up at him and cocked my head to the side. “Who?”
A line appeared between his eyebrows and he copied my head-tilting. “Um...Malvore? The dark sorcerer? He conjured about twenty of you out of that compost heap?”
I blinked again. “Swirly cape man?”
He laughed at that, then looked surprised. “You didn’t eve know the guy?”
“Not here.” I explained. “Then, pff! Here. Swirly cape man standing like:” I raised my arms high over my head and out to the side and puffed up my chest.
Ambrose laughed harder. “Lord above. That was it?”
I shook my head. “Say things.” I tapped my temple. “Here. Say “fight”. Say “kill”. Say “enemy”.”
As you may have noticed, my vocabulary has vastly improved since then. But Ambrose got the jist.
“Well, that’s...disturbing. I feel a bit...used, knowing that.”
I tilted my head again. I’d seen a dog do it once and it seemed to work. “You?”
Ambrose frowned. “Good point. Um...you live here?”
“Hiding.” I whispered. “Burning light find me, no more here.”
“Oh. The sun, right. You know they’re tearing this place down in a few days, right?”
A sagged at that and nodded.
Ambrose sighed again. “Totally. Insane.” He muttered.
When the sun rose, I was curled up in the bed of Ambrose’s guest bedroom, my greenish skin scrubbed raw and tender after a piping hot bath, with a thick quilt nailed over the window to keep the light out.
The next day I wore clothes for the first time. I felt the touch of a child, Ambrose’s daughter Cynthia, for the first time. I ate fresh, prepared food for the first time. I smiled for the first time, too, when Cynthia gave me a name.
Ellis. Like the Island.
When I was strong and healthy, and when Ambrose’s home and family had come to feel like my own, I began to join him on his missions at night. I hunted monsters and the people who emulated them. I saved the lives of innocent bystanders and comrades alike. Several times, I encountered my own kind, and I would not fight them. I killed their summoners instead. Those who survived, and there were never many, were taken to safe houses.
There are a few of us running around now. Not that you’d know it.
Years went by, and I began to change. I was never hungry anymore, so my body was filling out. I’d always kept my claws trimmed, but over time they grew more slowly, and far less thick. My skin was smoothing, my teeth dulling, and my ears lay more flat.
I began to discover that I could control my body’s construction, and that I was unconciously emulating the humans I lived with. Sandy, Ambrose’s wife, coached me through it, gave me lessons on human anatomy, sat with me to watch documentaries about biology, and kept a detailed chart of my metamorphosis.
We’ve got some theories about this. My personal favorite is that ghouls look like ghouls because that’s what the conjurer thinks they should look like, and in fact it’s the mental image of the body that forms the body. When I became self-aware, that mental image’s source switched to me. Or maybe it happened when Swirly Cape bought it. Either way, I was turning human, and I was giddy about it.
I tried turning into a dog, once. It wasn’t pretty. But I could turn back into my ghoulish form, which was handy for fighting. Even so, I was always relieved to change back into a man. I much preferred the shape I chose to the one forced on me by a man who didn’t care if I lived or died.
Now, here’s the thing about a lie.
If someone believes in it, really believes in the possibility of it, and works hard enough to make it real? It is.
Real enough to fool even the sun.
It took me twelve years. Cynthia was getting ready for college. I stepped onto the porch to see her off. She stood beside the car, damn near as nervous as I was, and held out her arms.
The sun was blinding on my eyes, and I felt the heat of it all along my new, coffee-colored skin, but the heat stayed on the outside of me and I walked the length of the driveway to pull her into my arms and hug the bejeezus out of her. She was crying and laughing at the same time.
I left Ambrose’s house not long after that. Got my license and set up my own agency in town. It’s not a big town, and I don’t do a ton of business, but I help people and Cynthia’s been here ever since she got her diploma, keeping my books in order and my head above water. I don’t have a perfect life. Most months I’m choosing between electricity and rent, and I’ve never been kissed by someone who didn’t wipe away the lipstick with a napkin afterward, but I’m alive.
I am really, really alive.