Jay Devau

A Hell of a Day.

 

     “You’re going to kill me,” she flatly declared. It would hurt. And he wouldn’t be happy. That was…disappointing.      There was pressure first. All pain seemed to start off as mild pressure before death. It was almost like the final farewell the world offered to the dying was a firm, certain touch. She felt her lips part a little in an unconscious display of agony. Maybe it was even alarm. The hand that shot through her throat wasn’t very gentle. The curled, unclean nails were jagged when they ripped through the softest tissue of her body. It was an unkind, gruesome death. She didn’t look back at her killer. Her vision as it began to swell red and gray was forever affixed to the wall on the far side of the room. There the slabs met in a lonely corner that seemed unnecessarily deep. Her ears rang so loud it consumed all sense. Her mouth overfilled with hot, coppery bitterness while her nerves twitched. She convulsed in stupid, uncontrollable jerks.

     Her sight roared in the crimson fires of a familiar embrace. While she watched, the wall seemed to rip away in a black char that began to consume the world as she knew it. It was a lovely thing to watch. True heat began to bite down on her skin until she felt ablaze with it. The Lucid’s howl became a human scream that became an echo and finally silence to the roar consuming her ears. Flecks of black ash swirled into her range of vision and without looking directly she witnessed the abomination’s burst into a flurry of charred flesh. She felt it fall away from her. Reality simply folded away into the ash of a new setting. Her head felt light and yet her body couldn’t have been more grounded.

      Ledari closed her eyes for what was both an instant and an eternity.

     Heat slammed down on her in a fierce, dry assault. Waves of thermal energy blew in her face, picking up her hair from beside her face. The girl took a deep breath and suppressed the urge to cough and hack on the unfathomably dry atmosphere.

     Opening one eye, she sighed at the sight before her.

     “He’s not going to be happy.”

     The room remained unchanged in many ways. Of course, the walls were charred now. They were blackened to the core as though bearing testimony as the survivors of a blaze she knew had never truly occurred. The door was little more than collapsed debris bearing the same smoldering characteristics as the walls and most everything else. She frowned then tucked her bare legs a little closer to her. She looked up and the corners of her mouth sagged further. Over her head a smoldering cauldron of a sky had replaced the ceiling. She preferred the static gray of the living world to the flare burping, black scratched, ash snowing expanse now looming above her. Just looking at it made the environment feel a hundred times hotter. Even though the room was still closed off from every other side, wave after wave of blaring heat continued to sway the tiny hairs on her body wafting in from what she knew was a whole other world beyond her fragmented space. The feeling was going to take more getting used to.

     Even though this would be her second time in Dis.