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 Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 12:58 am
.. . . . ]| House of Dolls |[ . . . ..In an attempt to gather cheer for an otherwise crippled sword Plague, the Excito of the Fellowship had organized a party for the little and the petite. It was a joyous thing, an event to be cheerful for all, but why is it that Clurie, usually one of the merriest, could glean little happiness from the event? .. . . . ..
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Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 1:03 am
.. . . . ]| One of a Certain Kind |[ . . . ..
The unsettling feeling had been developing in the pit of his stomach for some time now, a tiny little cankerous virus that had rolled in and around over itself, forming a lump that steadily grew in size whenever his name was mentioned, whenever he looked at his brother, whenever he looked down at his ember-glowing hands. It was no wonder that it had possessed him, entirely taken over every fiber of his being by the time that little Clurie entered the Excito party house in Sloane's lonely tower room. It was, though, an unprecedented change in philosophy, when the little ash plague known as Clurie Clemmings wandered out suddenly sure about the doubt he felt about his given name, but more importantly: himself.
Clurie's life was short so far, he knew, and in the beginning, he was scatterbrained, new, and curious, which went to foster his fragile memory and casual acceptance of the world as defined by Chauhn. There was nothing but immediate trust for him and what he had to say, and there wasn't any ground for him to argue him on, which left him with a stale and stagnant plot of earth for Clurie to struggle to grow in. It was difficult for him. Even though everything was good and everything that Chauhn tried to direct him in had meaning and weight, he struggled to grow. Every time he tried to budge and explore, develop some other kind of feeling, habit, or trait, Chauhn would choke him off, tuck him back into the dry and lifeless dirt of the past life he should once again be, instead of letting him extend his roots out to new and fertile possibilities. He was scatter his memories, replace it with new ones, or old ones that he was supposed to remember. He would make Clurie doubt himself, forget, and confuse. It wasn't a hostile thing, what Chauhn was doing, but it was as violent as twisting a bird's wings until they snapped and expecting the bird to live. Chauhn didn't understand that the faux constructed world that he had weaved about for Clurie had done nothing more but trap him underneath a wicker basket, choking off the fresh air and dampening any chance he might have had to burst into a beautiful flame. Clurie, on the other hand, understood this now. He understood what his brother had been doing to him this entire time. Choking him. Binding him. Slowly, but surely, killing him even before he was properly born.
And to realize this caused Clurie to weep as dryly as a wind through the chimney.
Clurie found himself sitting underneath the table on one of the carved lupine legs in Sage's unoccupied office, the place that he had been taken to while Chauhn was to be left alone to rest in the hospital wing. They wanted to keep him safe and out of trouble, and the best place for Sage and the other members of the Fellowship could figure to leave him in would be her writing room. At first, one would think it would be a stupid and ridiculous idea given Clurie's track record of burning anything flammable and trying to burn everything else that wasn't, but after a stern and cold talking-to with Sage, Clurie was as obedient as a trained hawk, wide-eyed with feathers ruffled and tense from his shoulders to his feet. So he stayed underneath her desk, far away from temptations, and in the dark, where at least the glow of his cheeks and hands had some strength to comfort him. He could think of his brother now, on the bed and quite painfully small against its rectangular shape, his hands twitching by his sides in a desperate attempt to get their dexterity back when they had been rusted slow with blood and clotting and healing. It made him sad. He was alone. And Clurie knew now just how alone he really was.
Because now, he was the last living Clemmings, more now than ever, and yet, at the same time, what he had always been.
Clurie knew now what he wasn't. He wasn't Clurie Clemmings. He wasn't the youngest brother out of a span of seven children founded on the east coast home of Imisus by a Mishkan trader father and a beautiful Imisese fisher's daughter. He wasn't a boy waiting to be transformed back into his true shape. He wasn't reincarnated. He wasn't human. He had never died, come close, but never dead. He was living, but he wasn't alive. He wasn't Chauhn's flesh and blood, but the mere ashes of what was left behind. He wasn't what he thought he was.
He did know now, though, what he was. He was a Plague. He was death itself, phoenix born from the literal ashes of what used to be Clurie Clemmings, the youngest child of the Clemmings line. He was a new being, a new little thing full to bursting with potential and power, an Excitos. But he still didn’t know who he was.
There was a vacuum emptiness inside of himself, a sapping kind of nothing that dragged his shoulders in upon his neck, pulled his knees tight to his chest and his arms folded aside one another on his chest. He didn’t know who he was if he wasn’t Clurie Clemmings, and that was a troubling thought. All other emotions, thoughts, likes, dislikes, were a product of something Chauhn had shaped in him, fostered in his tabula rosa personality. His curiosity, his goodness, his manners, and sense of honor, they were all implanted traits, not real. They were real in a sense, but they weren’t Clurie’s making. But, they were all he knew, and if he had to deny everything that was Clurie Clemmings to be true to the Clurie he was now, he was lost. By dipping everything in an acid pit of doubt, the Excito realized that absolutely nothing was his by birthright.
…Save the living spark. That was his and his alone. Chauhn couldn’t have instilled that or made that happen, that was something that happened that Clurie and Clurie alone, by no outside force than the warped properties of death, could have been responsible for. But the spark of life was a flat and stale personality if there ever was one…But sparks. Warmth. Ember and fire, the creators of destruction and ash, those were also his by birthright. Chauhn hadn’t instilled that. Clurie liked to destroy, not for the simple pleasure of destroying something, but for the cleansing, for the chance to start anew, to be as fresh and fertile as ash from a volcano. By nature it was a terrible thing, but Clurie knew the goodness in the act, its end all result and meaning: Creation through destruction. Clurie had those feelings, those tendencies all to himself. Defining those feelings was the lame ability of control. He lacked the reigns to his own horse-drawn carriage, but the chaos that ensued from such insanity was fresh, new, and invigorating, it reciprocated back to his tendencies for creation through destruction. The natural curiosity that stoked the fire of his imagination was also something that was his, something that he and the former Clurie he was born from had in common. But, while it was only a few elements to what should be a complex and interesting personality, it was something. Those few elementary parts of him that Chauhn had no control of, no hand in inspiring, would grow and branch off into a unique shape of self that was more true than any of the lies he had been forcibly crushed into before. That was all he, the Clurie who was smothered underneath the weight of a role that he wasn’t supposed to be.
And having definition, a true and natural one, was something that gave Clurie peace of mind. He could shuck off the skin of the little boy he was playing at and discover himself. But…No matter how he tried to convince himself, repeat to himself in the voice and words of Adal, or force himself to accept a new truth, he couldn’t drive a stake through the haunting word of his relationship to Chauhn Clemmings. He couldn’t cast down the word: brother.
No matter the lies and the naïve evil done to him by the boy, Clurie still felt an ineffable tie to him. It was something stronger than words, stronger than situations and circumstances, and certainly stronger than just “Grimm” and “Plague”. He could think of no word better suited to the feeling of attachment other than brother, even though the word itself tasted bitter and vile on his lips when he spoke it. Clurie twiddled his thumbs and picked at his fingerless gloves, unsettled and disturbed by the shroud of darkness that still hung over his glorious epiphany.
He was no longer the Clurie Clemmings that Chauhn wanted him to be, he was Clurie the Ash Plague. But what else was he to call him but brother? There was no other synonymous word with meaning strong enough to properly portray that feeling of dependency, of coexistence, of bond. But Clurie feared the word. He feared the denial of the truth he had just discovered if he were to speak it. But, what he feared even more, was the look in Chauhn’s face when he spoke it. It was a dangerous type of bitter longing, a mortal desperation disguised as happiness that exploded at any attempt that Clurie displayed to break away from Chauhn’s portrait as his brother.
So, for now, maybe until he was stronger, bigger, or perhaps even if Chauhn were to realize his deception on his own, he would keep the secret of his epiphany to himself. He would do what he could to keep Chauhn from becoming that monster that he had glimpses of those few and terrifying times. He would be Clurie Clemmings as best as he could, but, deep down, he would hold and tender the flame of his new and growing self, a more aware and a more true, Clurie the Ash Plague.
.. . . . ..
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:16 pm
.. . . . ]| Nympholepsy |[ . . . ..
It had been a matter of weeks before Chauhn was allowed to return to his humble and quaint little room in the depths of the Fellowship's dormitories. Like a bear trap, the medical ward had tug its teeth into his legs, keeping him from moving from his little white hospital bed and changing out of his white hospital clothes. He felt unbearably naked in those gowns, a thin and clingy material that singled him out from the purple and dark decor of the Fellowship's castle, a stark whiteness that highlighted the pallid hue of his olive skin and the bruises that puddled around his joints, the color of blood that he accidentally smeared onto his lap or upper arms when he wiped his hands or held himself. Chauhn wanted nothing more than to cover up those colorful reminders to the horror that he had been wasting every waking moment since that terrible day trying to forget. It was an exhausting activity, one that left little energy for him to deal with visitors, of which there were few and familiar. Jin-Ho among them, brows steepled, and Sloane for a time while he was stationed in a bed not more than five yards away, his dear lord Yizhaq who wore a face of grave seriousness and concern, glowing with something that Chauhn liked to call warmth, and Sage when she came to drop Clurie off for a small and quiet visit.
Clurie.
The one idea that kept Chauhn from breaking down into tears whenever the shadows grew long and the corners grew dark was the idea of his brother. He clung onto that nearly palpable ideal, reminding himself constantly with the echoed memory of laughter that belong to his little brother he was devoured by flame, a popping blackened shape. He hoped that the tone of Clurie's little incarnation would one day evolve into that same pitched giggle, one day. One day. He would strive to stay on until that one day and strive to stay on past that day to continue making his little brother laugh. He felt a little wobble in his knees when he dreamt up the future, a broken one, but one that would be more whole if he had some part of his family to distract him from everything else in the world...Like the cultists who had run his hands through with daggers.
It was a sickening experience, one that didn't seem to end. When he flexed his fingers, they were stiff and slow to respond, not at all dexterous like they had once been. He had trouble picking things up. His joints and muscles permeated with a thick gauze of growing and dead tissue that disabled him from making a firm grip and from being able to do things with his hands for long. The consequences for having hands that couldn't keep up with the work he gave them distressed Chauhn nearly to the point of madness. There was nothing else for him to do, nothing else that he could aspire to be than a worker, a servant, a stable boy, an assistant, everything that required a certain strength and ability of the hands for him to accomplish and do well. If he didn't have his hands, he didn't have work, if he didn't have work, he didn't have income, if he didn't have income, he couldn't provide for his brother and himself, he couldn't keep them surviving, he would have to beg, play the cripple's role on cobbled street corners with battered hats and containers made of tin to collect what pity he could from the random and nervous passersby. He could very easily imagine himself trampled into the slushy ice and snow of the Shyregoadian streets, his skull broken against the stones and shape distorted by the cart's wheels that ran over his sick and feeble body. It was just one of the many distorted fantasies that he entertained when he was left alone for too long with nothing to do.
But he had faith. He had hope. It ran about in the small shape of an Excito, spreading dust and ash about, setting the hem of things on fire and rushing to quench them before it turned into a disaster. Clurie made him happy, made him forget everything else. Clurie had the ability to make Chauhn abandon all those dark and terrible fantasies. Clurie gave something for Chauhn to devote himself to.
So when he returned to his room, his meager things collected in the hoop of one arm and the expectant look of joy on his face, he was more happy than words could describe. He was actually happy. To hear the little excited tingles and tangs of noise from the bell family only increased his happiness as he cautiously stepped in to his little sanctuary, smiling graciously at the little family that clamored at the corner of the table which had been crafted into a makeshift home for them in the time that he was gone, a little paradise made of knickknacks, shelves, shoes, and other personal belongings.
"Oh, sir!" they chattered and chimed, "Oh, sir, you're back! It's been a dreadfully long while we haven't seen you. We were so worried! Your hands are bandaged, sir, do they hurt, sir? Can we help unroll bandages for you, sir?" The little displays of concern and bright greetings made little flutters of belonging patter at the walls of his chest.
"Oh, ah am alrigh'," he said, depositing his things and reaching for his battered and dark colored clothes that he had folded in a pull out drawer. He wanted nothing more than to get out of the white tunic and pants he had been stuck in for seemingly forever. He put the clothes on the bed and was going to change into them when he screwed his mouth into a frown, distracted by the absence of Clurie. He had his eyes open wide for him since the instant he entered the room, but he still hadn't caught sight of the little soot sprite.
"Where's Clurie?" he asked.
The little bell family, whom, at least to Chauhn's knowledge, didn't have any names, ran in sync with one another to the opposite corner of the night stand. With their little arms, they gestured at the bed, which had been neatly made with meager blankets the last time that Chauhn had been in the room, several weeks ago. There was soot and ash all over, little prints of the ash plague's passage weaving webs of darkness all over the clean sheets, and Chauhn couldn't help himself but smile. He had failed to see his little brother nestled in the crook between the pillow and the sheets. It had gotten so gray with ash that the little body blended in while he slept, and there was not enough of uncommon clatter for Clurie to wake up from his groggy sleep. Chauhn leaned over and smiled reverently at him, pausing for a moment to admire the Excito that was made from his brother's ashes, before he scooped him up from the bed and into his bandaged hands.
Pulled away from sleep by the feeling of being lifted up from the sheets and ash, Clurie awoke with a shiver and a deep breath. The fingers around him didn't register as fingers until he rolled into the cradle of Chauhn's palm, and even then he didn't recognize them as his brother's hand. He blearily threw his head about, loosing his hat in the process, before his gaze fell upon the shadowed face leaning over him with an unnerving amount of happiness.
"Chauhn!" he said, and he pulled a smile onto his face. He could hear the lack of his usual enthusiasm in his voice and he hoped with all his little heart that the Grimm didn't pay it any mind. Honestly, ever since he had his epiphany, his mind had been whirling, awakening, seeing, and only now did he notice the solemn unsettling obsession in Chauhn's eyes, only now did he understand the precarious pedestal that he had been placed on. It was like stepping on coals with Chauhn, a delicate balance of do's and don'ts, and now that he knew it, he wanted to hop as fast as he could out of the coals all together. But now wasn't the time. Chauhn was still delicate, still fragile and bruised from his encounter, and if Clurie did anything at all out of line, he feared for the worst.
In response to the coals, Clurie decided to play along anyways. It would be the easiest thing to do, for now, and he would have to be most careful. He would have to dance for Chauhn, like a flame, control himself within the bounds of a hearth, warm his brother's cold heart until it wasn't so brittle that it would, at the slightest p***k, break.
Sorry thing for Clurie, though: he was clumsy.
"Oh, Chauhn, you're back!" he crowed, instantly summoning up a performance energetic enough to distract his brother, "They've finally realized you from the hospital ward? Have they really? Oh, it's been so long, Chauhn, since you've been back, days, handfuls of them! But you're back for good aren't you?"
Inwardly, he felt pleased when he saw the look on Chauhn's face ease into gladness. He was safe today. As Chauhn lifted him to his face to nuzzle against him, Clurie felt himself shiver again, although, this time for nervousness than for chill. "Ahm back for good," he heard Chauhn mumble in a solemn vow, "Ahm no' goin' t'leave you 'n' the littl'uns alone again. Ahm goin' to 'ave to work 'arder now, but ahll do whatever it takes to keep you 'n' them provided for."
There was a time that Clurie felt comfort in those words, a certain sense of protection, like he had been granted a limited spell of invulnerability, but now no longer. He only felt guilty. It was like he standing before Chauhn who had his blindfolded head caught in the cradle of a guillotine and it was his hand on the rope that would release the mortal blade. Were anything to happen it would be his fault, and by that dread alone, he felt the guilt already churn up knots in his guts.
"Littl'uns?" came a bell-like voice. It was the tallest of the silver boy bells, standing with his hands on his hips and a grin on his face. "We have names now!"
Clurie's gut folded back in on itself. It collapsed into a void.
"Oh, ahm glad o' it! You've got names now tha' 'ave been gone away?" Chauhn said with a tired smile.
Clurie, clambering to the side of Chauhn's palm did his best to grit his teeth at the silver boy, to shake his head as subtly as possible and give brief and panicked blinks of glowing warmth from his cheeks, anything to get the Excito from dooming them all. He hadn't thought of them, he didn't bother to think of anything more than the things he had control of, his own speech and actions. Fear began to take hold of his throat, jiggling his elbows against his ribs and knocking his wrists together as he begged quietly for the Bell Excito to shut up.
Yet, he continued, unaware of Clurie's frantic gesticulations. "We do, indeed," spouted the oldest and he waved his arm to his three siblings and himself. "We are the Notclemms."
Chauhn echoed the word softly, testing it out as if it were something that he should be familiar with. "Notclemms..." he mouthed with the twinge of his brow, "Funny name."
Now that Chauhn's attention was entirely on the little bell family, Clurie took to making his gestures for silence more exaggerated and pleading, waving his arms about his head, all but making a single sound. He feared the own sound of his voice should he scream. But...He could cough. Clurie gave a desperate inhale before he began his usual routine of wheezing clouds of ash into his arms and shoulders, at the same time, trying to give some kind of visual cue for silence. Thankfully, one of the bells looked his direction. She noticed. It was Midori, and the bell on her hat jingled as she looked to him with eyes wide. Yet, she did not understand, and before Clurie could make enough gestures to paint the desperate message he was trying to get across, Chauhn lifted Clurie closer to his chin and used his other bandaged hand to pat his back and help clear away some of the ash he was drowning in.
"My name," said the tallest silver Bell Boy, "Is Brad Lee!"
Chauhn stopped moving. Clurie stopped breathing.
"And I'm Micchi," intoned the other Excito boy, politely tipping his head. Brad Lee, arcing his arm to the golden bell girls, finished with a confident and grand voice, "These girls are named Minori and Midori." Minori gave a delicate bow, but Midori, with her face blank and pale, stayed still, staring at Clurie until realization dawned on her little face.
Then silence.
For a time there seemed to be nothing else but the void, a vacuum that devoured any sound and everyone's breath. The empty air itself seemed to harden into the consistency of molasses, hard and sticky, difficult to breathe and even harder to gulp. It was a terrible kind of silence to try and survive through, and Clurie could almost feel death's cold fingers digging into his chest for the spark of beating warmth that kept him alive. He was sure he was about to die. For, the fingers of Chauhn's hands had begun to curl about him into a fleshy cage.
The kind of pain those names ignited in Chauhn's chest was unfathomable. The simple weaving of those syllables was enough to rend Chauhn's heart to pieces and with each increasing patter of his heart, he could feel the brittle casing protecting him from such woes crack and peel away in a simple blast of heat from within, signs of a terrible swelling in his heart. His eyes filmed over with water and his fingers began to tense while, below him, his knees began to tremble. The pain from the simple mathematics in his head, the simple guide to how things should be as according to Chauhn, blinded him. His family was dead. The Clemmings were dead and gone, burned, buried, and blasted away. There was nothing left of the family but he, now, he and the ashes of Clurie, Clurie the little brother to be. They were alone. The others were dead. The others could not be replaced. They could never be replaced. And the mere thought of the little monstrous things here parading about with the names of his siblings drove him to and over the breaking point. Chauhn cracked.
"No," he muttered. The boy, with his face drawn with pale lines of torment, closed his bandaged hand around Clurie as if in a protecting gesture. He didn't shake. With his other, he reached forward, terribly slowly, and then, within the span of a blink, he snapped his wrist out, snatching up the proud little Silver Plague that pretended to be Bradley.
He said, "You are not Bradley."
He didn't hear the screaming of the little bell plagues nor the hideous shriek of Clurie's rasp. All he heard was the dull and high-pitched squish of soft tissue breaking and squeezing out between his fingers.
The smell of foul decay and the tangy hint of metal wafted into the air, complementing the hysterical shrieks of fear that were erupting from the Bell Plagues and from little ash Clurie. Chauhn couldn't hear them, too entralled in the repetition of those names, those names, his family's names ringing in his head and bouncing about driving him more and more completely mad. His hands were hurting, screaming with pain from the stretched and ripped open wounds, but that didn't stop him. He tightened his grip around the wiggling form of Clurie, and, without disgust or care, wiped the remains of the broken body squished into a state of messy gush and pitch on his white hospital clothes. Trembling, his eyes marked with beads of tears, the tremors of rage that had been twitching the corners of his face compounded into a full on earthquake and he released a terrible, gut-raking howl.
"THEY'RE DEAD. THEY'RE ALL DEAD," he shrieked. He squeezed his hands until they began to bleed red through the bandages. "THERE'S NOTHING THA' CAN REPLACE 'EM. 'OW DARE YOU TRY TO REPLACE 'EM. THIEVING' LIT'LE MONSTERS, YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE 'EM AWAY FROM ME?! YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE 'EM AWAY? THEY'RE DEAD! NOT EVEN AH CAN 'AVE 'EM BACK, NOT EVEN ME. NOT EVEN ME!"
With unsteady steps, the Clemmings boy wobbled to the night stable, desperately swiping and raking his fingers through the air for the Notclemms family, who scattered and scrambled across the polished wood, screaming bloody murder and sobbing for their lost sibling. Clurie, squeezed breathless in Chauhn's death grip, feeling the wetness of warm blood seep into his clothes from his bandages, could hardly lift his voice.
"Run! Run, run away!" he wheezed, trying with failing energy to kick himself free. He tried to wiggle his hands free, tried to burn Chauhn with his fingertips, his cheeks, anything, but the bandages on his hands were thick and protective against his little sparks and coughs of flame. Clurie tried to will himself into ash, like he had at the carnival, but he couldn't manage to do it. His focus was scattered, shredded by the teeth of the horror at hand. He couldn't think, he could hardly breathe, starved of oxygen which smothered his flame.
All he could hear, in the back of his head, were dry echoes of all Chauhn's promises made to him not so long ago.
.. . . . ..
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:17 pm
.. . . . ]| What have you done |[ . . . ..The last strand of Chauhn's wavering sanity finally snapped when he discovered the names of the Notclemms family modeled after his own deceased siblings. Interrupting the bloodbath to be, Sloane charges in to bear witness to Chauhn's fall from grace. .. . . . ..
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:20 pm
.. . . . ]| Bereft of Purpose |[ . . . ..
So...He really was alone.
Chauhn shifted against the cold cobbled stone of the dungeon cell. His hot breath steamed up from the tile and he tried his hardest to blink through the dryness in his eyes as he brought up his head to peer around at the shadowy corners of the small cramped cell. It was dark, terribly dark. It was so dark that, for a moment, Chauhn felt like he had been thrown into the void. His breathing hitched, tripped, and picked up into a quick series of gasps, and he tried to pick himself up or at least roll over, but when he pressed his loosely bandaged hands to the ground, newly swollen and soaked with fresh blood, he yelped and collapsed back on the floor, pulling his aching hands tight to the space beneath his chin.
His body, as he was aware of it, was mapped out with bright hot areas of pain according to his mind. In his hands was the brightest of the pain, but also blaring in his awareness was the pain in his cheek where he had been backhanded by Sage, the rub of fabric around his neck when he had been held up by his collar, and the ache of tight fingers around the underneath of his arm as he was dragged to the bottom most floors of the Fellowship establishment and hauled into the dungeon. But the area that hurt him the most was the terrible gaping wound that had opened up in his chest, a yawning maw of realization that hurt more than any wound he had ever received before.
He was alone.
The founders of the Clemmings family, his mother and father, were dead. His eldest brother was the first to contract the plague and his siblings, one by one, followed suit until it was just himself and Lynn, watching over Clurie as he succumbed to the boils and disease on the fireplace hearth, begging for his favorite lullabies to be repeated while the popped buboes on his skin flowered with damp marks on his ratty clothing. Lynn had died in the boarded up house after tying Clurie's ashes around Chauhn's neck in a little leather bag and he, the last survivor, had crawled up out of the chimney and into the nameless streets of the Imisese coastal town. He was the last. He was alone. For two years he had felt that loneliness as his constant companion in every task he forced himself to complete in honor of upholding the Clemming's family honor. He ate by himself, slept by himself, walked and spoke alone with himself and the overwhelming presence that was loneliness. But he never really completely felt alone, even then, when the feeling was new and most powerful. He had the ashes of his brother on a lace around his neck. It was only when they began showing signs of life that he began to notice the foul feeling, of what loneliness was when he wasn't alone.
For the entirety of his life, he never had to worry about being by himself. He had his large family with him at all times in some way or another. He could always depend on them when he needed, he could always be with them and they'd always be there, whether he liked it or not. They functioned as a whole, as one moving mechanical unit that depended on itself and those within to survive. He was never himself, never just "Chauhn" an individual with individual needs and concerns. He was "Chauhn the second youngest of the Clemmings family". So the word and the feeling of loneliness wasn't in his vocabulary until it was forcefully introduced by the death of his siblings. Now he knew what it was. Now that his precious bag of his brother's ashes had turned into a tiny little being that Georgie and Adal and a handful of others referred to as an Excito, a type of Plague, he was truly alone, no longer accompanied by even the remains of his family, just their ghosts.
But even with just their ghosts, Chauhn tried to convince himself that he wasn't alone. He was surrounded by people, so technically he wasn't and will never be alone. Sloane, despite their many adventures and fall outs, was there, as well as his Grimm and there was also his Lord Yizhaq and the few other servants that Chauhn interacted with. Jin-Ho was among the few that he could talk with ease, and there were a few other individuals that he had met in passing of whose company he'd enjoyed. He wasn't alone. There were thousands of other people in the world, all around him, running into him, running around and about him, so he wasn't alone.
Yet, no matter the reasoning he tried to employ, Chauhn, at that moment, belly-down in the middle of a windowless and cold empty cell in the Shyregoadian dungeon of the Fellowship, with no ash filled bag about his neck and no little body clinging to his neck, had never felt so inexplicably and completely alone.
He was damned. The black smear on his dirty white apron condemned him as much as the black gunk mixing in with the blood on his bandages wrapped about his hands. He had killed an Excito and he felt no regret about it, hardly thought about it at all, but it had condemned him all the same to this small personal square footage of hell.
It was never so clear before until that moment the little disgusting body squeezed between the cracks and knuckles in his fingers. He was alone. No one else could understand or help him now. He had to figure it out himself, and he was slowly beginning to realize just what it was he had to do. It was a little hard to reason his way to his ultimate conclusion, but it made the most sense out of all the chaos he had to experience in his young life. He was alone. And if he was alone, that meant that Clurie wasn't his brother. Clurie was an Excito, one of the same little things that he had mashed into a black pulpy mess in between his fingers. And that meant only one thing for Chauhn, gave him only one thing to do to Clurie.
So it was there, against the floor of the cell, that Chauhn beached himself up on an unstable beach of desperate reasoning, and laughed.
He was, after all, alone.
.. . . . ..
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:30 pm
.. . . . ]| Stitches and Stones, Broken Bones |[ . . . ..Alerted of the chaos between the Clemmings brothers, Jin-Ho steps in to quietly assist with what he can for the distraught Chauhn, but, confined to a bare room, can Jin-Ho offer any more clarity in counseling for the Clemmings boy than the blank walls can? .. . . . ..
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:44 pm
.. . . . ]| Hollow Cell |[ . . . ..Chauhn's lonely time of imprisonment in the Shyregoadian dungeon is interrupted by a strange and tormented woman, possessed with a contagious kind of insanity that comes in the form of hard candies. .. . . . ..
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:48 pm
.. . . . ]| |[ . . . ..
Comfort is given to an unwilling Clurie, who stirs in between a mental tug of war between helping his Grimm or leaving him to the authorities.
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:50 pm
.. . . . ]| Forgive and Condemn |[ . . . ..
For a good several hours, Clurie couldn't get his heart to stop racing in his chest. Passed out on doll house sized bed where he was carefully left by the other Excitos in a room on his own, finally in a place of sanctuary, he let himself lay still and motionless, focusing on reflating his lungs which had been crushed in by Chauhn's grip. Every so often he would cough up a splutter of ashes, wince at the ache in his chest and limbs, then relax again. For Clurie, it was easier to focus on breathing than it was to focus on the recent events of horror that played on loop in the back of his head. But even with his desperate and directed focus on the sound of air passing in and out of his little haggard mouth, he couldn't completely block out the images of his brother as he tightened his fingers around Brad Lee until he popped like a rotten fruit within the squeeze of his knuckles. Every time his memory replayed to that point, Clurie winced, whimpered, and set his face into a firmer grimace.
His life was spinning into a cyclone of ashes it seemed, whisked into the air by Chauhn's cry of anguish and rage, and Clurie knew not what to do. What could he do? He was a tiny ash plague, a little being in the disguise of the life he had apparently stolen, and Chauhn was his Grimm, the single person to which he was anchored by an invisible and impenetrable bond. He couldn't ever get away from him. Even if Chauhn had been interned into a psycho ward, clapped in chains and drugged to a point of forced placidity. There was that constant, always present, fear that Chauhn might come again and hold him in his hands, tenderly call him brother and stash him in his allotted place on his shoulder where he had comfortably come to perch. Suddenly, his hands felt empty, and he realized his fingers were remembering the sensation of holding tight onto Chauhn's clothes, accidentally smearing ash onto the fabric and desperately trying to pat it away without patting it instead into flames. He remembered the calm chuckle from Chauhn, who found the routine a quirky and amusing act. He remembered laughing back.
With a frustrated groan, Clurie flipped over on the bed, leaving a Clurie-shaped imprint of ash on the sheets. He chose instead to think of all the times that Chauhn had squeezed him, crushed his lungs, threatened his head to burst off his neck like a cork from a shaken wine bottle. Desperately, he clung onto that fear, wrestling it into place like a scratchy scarf around his neck until he was certain that the feeling in his gut was nothing but disgust for the boy who he had the ill fortune of having as his Grimm. Chauhn had deceived him, lied to him, pressed him into a mold he couldn't fit, essentially abused him through his hopeful manipulation, and there was no way that Clurie could forgive him for that, for spewing such profanities of existence, telling him stories that he took for granted. He couldn't forgive him of taking away his identity, or rather, imposing one upon him. But...At the same time...Chauhn gave him life. He gave him an identity, sure it was a false one, but Clurie, when he thought about it was sure that he meant no harm.
"NO!" Clurie shouted into the blankets. The sound came out as a muffled grumble. His cheeks grew hot and he had to dig his arms underneath his face so that he didn't accidentally singe the sheets. As well as rub the black area where his eyes should have been.
Chauhn hurt him! Scared him, tormented him....Chauhn was a monster. But...Clurie couldn't deny the countless times that Chauhn had stood up for him, defended him, put his life on the line for him. Clurie moved onto his side, allowing his arms space enough so he could count all the times that Chauhn had put himself into mortal danger on his account. There was the time where he had been kidnapped, nearly dumped into a frozen river if it weren't for Sloane...And all those instances and trials he had to endure until he finally returned to Imisus and the Council. He had run on blistered feet to complete a mission for the scientists when he was already weary and ill, just so that he could have a safe place to protect Clurie. He had slept in chimneys, starved himself, thrown himself into peril, placed himself into servitude and work every day under orders, left his homeland, and studied every hour he wasn't working. Clurie gulped down a nervous lump of guilt, and it made his gut feel sick.
"No, no, no!" Clurie shouted again into the fabric, digging his hands into his hat and wrenching it down over his face. He grit his jaw, summoning up again all the times that Chauhn had hurt him, threatened him, and hurt others,e forced himself to recall the very moment that brad Lee was popped into mush between his fingers, but...Despite all the ugliness in Chauhn, it couldn't outweigh the things that he had done for him, all those things he sacrificed. He still owed him something.
Perhaps...
Clurie lifted up from the bed, slowly sitting himself into an upright sit on the corner. He took off his hat and looked at it, his fingers clasping its edge. He turned it over, then looked down at himself, ashen clothes and stitched together fabric, a cheap and poor ensemble if there ever was one. He was gross. He looked shoddy and pathetic, a plebeian, an ankle-biter. He looked like the coal, not the buried diamond in the rough. Clurie was just the rough...But he knew that he was more than that. The value bestowed upon him by Chauhn made him feel like a treasure trove of diamonds, a diamond in every coal. Chauhn had made him feel precious.
Clurie sniffed. Then he drew his sleeves across his face, attempting to rub his face clean.
...Perhaps Chauhn was the same way. Underneath all that grit and gross, there was a diamond too. Clurie just had to make him see it, just like Chauhn had made him. He knew what he had to do now.
Clurie pressed his mouth into a determined frown before he wrangled his dirty messenger boy's cap back onto his head. Dusting himself off as much as he could, he lifted up from the bed and clapped his hands together so that they glowed with sparks and ember, and then rubbed his cheeks until they were bright red with glowing determination. He knew where Chauhn was now, Sloane had shouted it when the boy was dragged away. It would be a long way for him to scuttle to the dungeon, but it had also been a long way for Chauhn to travel from Shyregoad to Imisus, and back again. Clurie owed that journey a dozen times over. The Clemmings Excito scuttled as quietly as he could out of the room and dodging the other Plagues, he eventually managed to find a way to slip surreptitiously from the Plague House. A careful climb down the strings attached to the table corners left him on the floor, and sneaking alongside the room's edge, he found his way to the door of Sloane's room, under which there was a crack just tall enough for Clurie to press himself under. He crawled and wiggled, restraining himself from coughing and giving away his position, because he knew that if he were caught, Sloane and the others would keep him from reaching Chauhn at all costs for fear of the worst that might come to happen. Clurie couldn't afford that, he had to complete his journey, find his way back to his Grimm's side.
He had to give Chauhn another chance.
.. . . . ..
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Posted: Wed Oct 20, 2010 12:02 am
.. . . . ]| Fall From Grace |[ . . . ..
Clurie tripped as he lowered himself down from the last stairwell. For seemingly ages, down countless amounts of steps, Clurie had been levying himself over the corners and dropping onto the next platform, falling to his rump and muttering with half-hearted curses when he rubbed his aching knees and massaged his sore feet. He had finally made it down the flights of stairs that led from the top level where Sloane's bedroom was located, through all the levels in between, and finally to the lowermost levels where the cold clung to the walls and his breath came out of his mouth in little puffs of fog and smoke. Shivering made his shoulders knock about his neck and when he rubbed at his cheeks to try and keep his digits from turning pallid and pale with the cold, they only lasted for so long before they became cold again. Clurie pressed onward, secretly investing his hopes in reconcile with his Grimm and of being held close to his chest so that he could be warm again.
The dungeon was a long and narrow passage of doors, heavy wooden slabs that were hard for Clurie to try and squeeze under, but squeeze between the cracks he did, checking each cell for his Grimm. He couldn't hear anything, no clue of breathing or shuffling that would have betrayed Chauhn's whereabouts, and when he finally came to the end of the hall, he was slow and sluggish with the chill of the place. But his searching was not in vain. When he began to press himself underneath the crack of that door, crawling on his belly on the cold floor, he heard breathing within, and he knew he had found his Grimm.
When he came out on the other side, he saw a shadowy shape snarled in a knot upon itself on the floor, wrapped up in a dark jacket that was too large for his small shoulders. Clurie bit his lip and pulled himself up from the ground, warily stepping forward with tiny barely audible footprints upon the floor. His Grimm's breathing was labored and quick, as if he were in the choking grip of a nightmare, and his ankles and wrists would twitch with every sharp inhale of breath. When Clurie got closer, he could see that Chauhn was doubled over his stomach, miserably holding his head and hiding his face underneath the crook of his arm while his knees pulled up tight to his chest. He looked so cold. The bandages on his hands were replaced and clean, and there seemed to be no more of the endless bleeding from his wounds. Smelling brought no scent of blood to Clurie's well-honed olfactory senses and he twisted his mouth in thought. There was another weird smell as well, something that Clurie couldn't quite place. There was no way that his wounds could have healed so quickly, unless someone else with magic had come down to visit him, and the only person who could come to his mind was Jin-Ho, their tutor. Clurie wasn't counting on this. He had been hoping for Chauhn to be weak, heavy with wounds, despite it hurting him to hope for such cruel things, but he knew it would make it easier to talk with him if he weren't entirely capable of moving about with good health and giving him more cause for mortal worry. It wouldn't change the fact that he was there, though, it couldn't convince him to turn his back and come back the way he had come. Clurie had a self-imposed mission to complete.
Clearing his throat of the ash that so often congested it, Clurie took a tentative step closer, doing his best to measure out one of Chauhn's arm's lengths between them. Closer, Clurie's hearing could pick up some muttering speeding in between Chauhn's breathing, a fluster of words like a flock of startled birds mindlessly flapping every which way with every one of his breaths. Clurie felt his gut twist and he coughed again more pointedly. When he didn't get his attention that way, Clurie frowned, rubbed at his cheeks until they were bright red, and then clapped his hands as loudly as he could, a shower of sparks leaping up from the clap of his hands. That got Chauhn's attention, but it wasn't the kind of attention that Clurie was hoping for.
Highlighted by the momentary flash of light from Clurie's hands, Chauhn jerked up from the ground and threw himself away from the glint. He rolled over onto his back so he could kick and squirm away from the little burst of flame on the ground, and whimpered like he were being tortured with hot metal prods and chains. Shouting, he drew the two sizes too large jacket over his chest and kicked defensively at Clurie who was thankfully already a good few feet away and was able to scamper into a safer distance.
"GE' BACK!" Don't touch me!" Chauhn squealed in terror, breathing hard, "WHA' ARE YOU? Wha' are you?!"
Clutching his hat to his head as he skipped to a stop, Clurie swallowed an apology that he was going to give to Chauhn before he realized just how oddly his Grimm was acting. The Clemmings boy was usually a stable kind of fellow, provided he did have his freak outs, but they were quick to pass and subject to adamant apologies afterward. Clurie was expecting for him to be depressed if anything, a sniveling and droopy mess, but he wasn't prepared to step back from a terrified and dangerous boy who had the qualities of a cornered dog, terrified and baring his teeth. Clurie swallowed hard and held up his hands in a peaceful gesture, trying to fight back the shiver that was crawling up his spine.
"Mercy! Mercy!" he said, hoping that those words alone would be able to calm him.
So far, Chauhn was terrified and healed, a terrible combination for Clurie to try and interact with, but interact he did, his faith placed entirely on the love that once bound them so tightly together. If Chauhn loved him, Clurie kept repeating to himself, he wouldn't hurt him again. He figured he would have to keep repeating that to himself, his first ever prayer.
"Chauhn," said Clurie, raising his voice so he could be heard, "It's me, it's Clurie." His own heart thrummed in his chest with anticipation, and he stepped a bit closer, trying to move as gently as he possibly could, like stepping on coals.
Chauhn, staring back at him, only increased his breathing. He wasn't pacified or calmed at all by Clurie's introduction. If anything, he looked more disturbed by it, and his mouth trembled with fear as if Clurie had turned himself inside out right then and there, displaying guts and teeth-like ribs, and was making an effort to crawl over to his exposed foot and start chewing on it. Clurie looked down at himself, as if to assess whether or not this had actually happened, before he looked back up and clasped his hands together once more in a praying kiss of palms.
"It's Clurie, Chauhn...It's me," he said again, this time more gently, but Chauhn interrupted with a despairing bellow of sound.
"NO!" he screamed, "YOU'RE NOT CLURIE! YOU'RE NOT CLURIE!" His grip around his jacket tightened, and the frown on his face deepened. Inflating his chest with such rapid movements was his breathing, somehow speeding up until Clurie worried for Chauhn. He would soon pass out from so much breathing, he was sure.
He tried once more, keeping his distance and contemplating a step back. "I am Clurie," he said, and when he spoke he could hear the trembling in his voice, "I'm just...I'm not the Clurie you want."
"Like hell you are," Chauhn growled and he narrowed his reddened eyes at Clurie, suddenly strengthening his shoulders. It was as if the affirmation alone was enough to dispel his initial fear.
Clurie winced physically from his Grimm's words, his little mouth twisting into a somber frown. It was what he had been wanting for weeks now, an acknowledgment from Chauhn that he wasn't his brother reincarnate, but it didn't feel sincere here, not in this cold dank cell, drowning in darkness and shadows. It didn't seem right, and that might have entirely been because Chauhn didn't feel like Chauhn...But when Clurie looked deep into the reflective glint of Chauhn's incriminating green gaze, he knew in his gut that this wasn't his Grimm nor the Clemmings boy that he had come to love and admire. His eyes were red...His breathing was unnaturally quick and staggered, and by the way that Chauhn moved, it didn't seem like he had complete control over his body, like it was slipping away and out of his grip. It wouldn't count for either of them.
"I'm not your Clurie," the Ash Plague said more resolutely, trying to strengthen his voice in the same way that Chauhn strengthened his, "I never was your Clurie. Not from the moment that I was born." He straightened his spine and firmed his stance, lifting up his chin and snapping off his hat, an ingrained show of manners for the important declaration at hand. He took a deep breath.
"I'm not your brother."
At first, Clurie thought that the ballooning feeling in his gut was a sense of relief, a release of burden, or prolonged success at finally speaking a truth that had for so long plagued him and his thoughts, but the way that it expanded and stuck to the insides of his chest, hardening into a lump that threatened the ease of his fearful breathing, he knew that it was nothing else but raw and ugly dread. It fermented in his gut with every passing second that it took for Chauhn to make his anticipated reply, and when Chauhn finally spoke again, Clurie couldn't tell if he were sick from the anxiety alone or the next set of words placed against him.
"You're not my brother," Chauhn whispered. He spat out the words like they were vile, a thick and fast-acting poison, when he narrowed his gaze at him, Clurie felt that dread crawl and scrape within him, like a frightened animal trying to claw it's way out through his back and away from Chauhn as quickly as possible. "...You're a Plague...You're the same blasted 'n' bloody thing tha' killed m'family. You're the same thing tha' killed them all, Lynn 'n' Bradley...Michi 'n' Minori 'n' Midori...You killed my little brother Clurie...You're...You are the plague tha' killed my family. You are the..."
Clurie began to step back, his hands now shaking in front of him with a slowly dawning realization, the same realization that was blooming from an inkling of violent thought to a torrent of horrible understandings. Like the brothers they once pretended to be, synchronized in thought and action, they unified in thought again, and, in unison, dropped their jaws.
"...plague."
It was at that instant that Clurie knew his efforts were in vain. He had walked into a death trap, and as if to fend off this terrible epiphany, he began to step back warily into a careful backwards run, his hands raised up in fear. But Chauhn was cracking himself from his defensive ball of shivering hate, like a monster, breaking himself free from the cold that froze his limbs.
"...You...You're coming for me, now, aren't you?!" Chauhn squeaked in fear, his voice breaking with a boyish snap, and he gave a manic laugh, one that was born from terror, a twisted lying thing. His voice was torn and mutilated between being a high-pitched wail of grief and a sonorous growl of rage, like he couldn't decide just what feeling he should be expressing, and instead, flip flopped madly between the two so that he sounded rightly disturbed. Settling himself onto his knees, Chauhn quivered in place, attempting to convince himself to pounce forward in animal hunt or stay far away with his back to the wall, bouncing between the two in an untrustworthy sway. A smile pulled at the corner of one side of his mouth while the other twitched and slumped. "You're comin' for me! You've taken everyone else 'n the Clemmings family 'n' now you've come to give me the Plague, 'aven't you? You've come to make me sick, make me turn black 'n' blue all over, 'n' kill the last of the Clemmings, aren't you?! Ugly, vile, evil thing, you! You can't kill me! Ah am the last! Ah can't die! I am the last!"
As Chauhn gave a terrible inhale, sucking enough air to expand his lungs to their limit, Clurie scrambled for the door. His heart was beating in his throat and he tripped over himself as he skittered as fast as his little legs could carry him, while, behind him, Chauhn gave an ear-splitting scream, covering up all the "I forgive you"s that Clurie was trying to shout, his reason for making his perilous journey in the first place. The heavy wooden door that Clurie dived under, at the force of the scream, trembled, or was the door trembling in response to the scream? Clurie had never seen Chauhn's magic prowess before and the one time that he was with his brother for such a shocking display of power, was the same time he clutched desperately to the cusp of life, comatose and balled up in Chauhn's soggy pocket. So when it was that Clurie wiggled under and crawled free from the other side of the door, it was to his complete and utter horror that the door above him exploded into a thousand arms of branches, rushing down to slam all around him like a barrage of arrows. It was just Clurie's luck that his natural reflexes kicked in, his own uncontrollable magic, because, in the same instant that he might have been speared by one of the deadly branches driving into the stone and splitting it in twain, Clurie's body burst apart into ashy fragments, and reassembled a few inches away from the branches wiggling into the stone floor. Behind him, the door cracked and peeled itself apart, busting open like a wire cage being blown apart from the inside, belching louder and louder with each crack and the sound of the lonely Clemmings' boy's anguish.
Digging his fingers into the cracks of the rocks, propelling himself forward, Clurie raced with trips and skids across the stone, while, behind him, the branches hop scotched across the stones after him, growing new and thinner twigs and sharp spears of wood to try and impale him. But they could only stretch so far, and within seconds, Clurie was dashing out of their reach, desperately searching for a way to escape the dungeon. There were other cells, other doors that he could scramble under, but Clurie feared going close to the doors, which he could hear, behind him, bursting into more branches and twigs as Chauhn crawled out of his cell and stumbled after him, a screaming boy banshee sending his minions of verdure scrambling after him.
Clurie heard something else too, and it wasn't until he really tried to pay close attention to it that he realized just what it was in the cacophony of sound compounding around him. He was sobbing, dry sobbing, but sobbing nonetheless, terrified and shot through the heart with an arrow of guilt every time that Chauhn opened his mouth to scream bloody murder after his scurrying little body. Rushing and thankful that he couldn't cry any tears to block his vision, Clurie spotted a gap in the stone, just up ahead near the stairs that would be impossible for him to climb and the end of the hallway itself. He didn't bother to glance behind him, he knew what was crawling after him. Attempting to concentrate himself into ash, Clurie willed his scatterbrained and terrified mind to focus, and he vanished again with a plume of ash, whisked away into the crack and through the tiny air and passageways until he reformed again outside and fell onto cold wet and slippery stones, that instantly sucked the energy out of him.
He was thankful enough for the adrenaline granting him energy enough to pick himself up and stumble away from the stone wall, sobbing aloud and running as fast as he could across the hoarfrost and ice, clapping his hands together to try and keep himself warm with sparks of ember, while behind him, the screams of Chauhn Clemmings were chocked to silence by the wall between them and the blizzard that was descending from the gray sky in indifferent drifts of white.
.. . . . ..
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Posted: Wed Oct 20, 2010 12:03 am
.. . . . ]| Save Us |[ . . . ..Fleeing from the Fellowship compound, Clurie is being hunted down by his manic and grief-crazed Grimm when he runs into the Malt Brothers. Begging them to save him from his Grimm, he discloses Chauhn's fall from grace and looks to them for help and sanctuary. .. . . . ..
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Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2011 8:41 pm
.. . . . ]| Sin |[ . . . ..
Ever since he had accepted the hard candy from Beatrix, hungrily sucked at it until it was nothing but a lingering taste in his mouth, Chauhn had been feeling odd. Already he was stewing in regret for the things he had done, guilt for his insanity and guilt for the black smears in his clothes, but overwhelming those feelings was an immense and terrible doubt that suffocated him and drowned any other moral feelings he was trying to entertain and figure out. His brother was not his brother, and he knew he had to do something about it. The insanity that was with him prompted him to do one dark and sinful thing, while the faint and noble glow of his once golden heart, screamed at him to repent. Even that much of inner conflict, though, was enough to make him feel sick inside his cold and shivering self, but when the effects of the hard candy began filtering in through his system, he started to feel that doubt and anxiety compound.
If only he had known that the candy given to him was no normal candy but a drug-laced treat, poison to his feeble body, he might have spat it out and calmly waited for his judgment to come. But the darkness was a festering thing, like a plague's bubo, swelling and tumid, ripening with all the feelings swirling about in a sick swirl at the bottom of his gut. The drug magnified these feelings, and when Chauhn looked down at his hands, forcing his red-veined eyes to focus from their dizzy wobble, he feared the eye-like wounds in his palms would open and stare back at him with the Clemmings' family green glare. He stuffed his hands between his knees, trying to warm them from their numb state, but with nothing to look at but the shadows, he found himself imagining Sloane's form peeling itself from the wall, racing towards him with his dual toned eyes swirling in their sockets and blades of blood ripping out of the wounds along his arms. Looking another way, towards the door, he could see Sage peering through with her fiery gaze, slowly burning and cracking the door in twain so that the flame stole away every ounce of oxygen left in his small holding cell. Chauhn felt like he couldn't breathe anymore and his lungs beat and flapped in the rattling cage of his ribs, jumping faster and faster until his head swam. Holding his eyes shut and trying to hold his quickly devolving world in place, he thought he could see fingers prying open his eye lids, forcing Chauhn to look again at the little burnt and crisped body of his little brother, an emancipated and dark thing, with bright yellow teeth and wet smears that were his melting eyes running down the channels of his cheeks. When Chauhn opened his eyes, expecting to see his burnt and crisped little brother flaking away into chunks of char, he saw, not just burnt little Clurie, but his entire family, festered with buboes that crawled up the shapes of their jawlines and the curves of their necks, darkened the area underneath their arms with blood and pus. Bradley was wrapped in the moth-eaten blankets he had bundled himself up with in his passing and the twins and Michi were covered in dirt and mud, coughing up earth and picking out rocks from beneath their cracked nails. Lynn was as beautiful as ever if it weren't for the dark splotches running up underneath her ears. They pressed in close around Chauhn, bearing down at him with concerned gazes, and Chauhn felt again like he couldn't breathe, and when Clurie ran his charred fingers in a soothing rub across his arm, Chauhn wanted to scream with all the breath in his lungs, but he was petrified, scared stiff. He couldn't scream, couldn't breathe, and the overdose of oxygen running through his veins choked his perception of the world and his body. His heart felt like it was falling apart while beating its furious tabor in his chest, burning, beating, blaring, bloating, and bleating Chauhn's imminent death.
Then a little shadowy shape pulled itself from the darkness. Chauhn couldn't remember just what it said or what he said in reply to its pleas, because his mind was all too quickly understanding just what it was that stood before his crumpled body on the floor. It was the Plague, the very same plague that killed his family, and now it was come for him. He knew what he had to do, he had figured it out moments before, before he was given the strange and poisonous candy, and he wasn't about to let this vile and monstrous disease to kill him too, press him into the ranks of the dead Clemmings family. Before Chauhn knew it, the only thing his body and mind were screaming in haunting unison were commands: ashes to ashes, death to death. And he finally was able to release that ugly pent up scream from the tangle of rotten motions in his chest. His body from that point on moved on its own, drunkenly surging forward while his mind scrambled to keep up; and with every step he took, shrieking and blasting out the door of the cell from within with the crack of branches, he grew more and more attached to the idea of death.
Kill it before it kills you...that's what life was, wasn't it? Chauhn sometimes felt like he were laughing and sometimes he felt like he were weeping aloud, but crawl out of the cell he did, and he soon found himself stumbling through the cell hallways with branches bursting out of the doors before him, reacting to the sounds he made in howling pursuit of the little black scrambling monster that skittered out of his reach. His brain felt like it had turned into a soupy mess in his cranium, swirling and sloshing every which way as he forced his weak knees to walk, and his blood fizzed with oxygen, feeding his heart as he hyperventilated. But walk forward he did, until he came to the end of the hallway, where the Plague vanished through the wall. No matter.
Chauhn focused his efforts on the stairs and with little difficulty he scaled them, and when he came to the first window, he cracked open the latch and leaned outside, inhaling the brisk thickening storm air with a mad and amused air while his body trembled in fear. He looked down to the white snow and decided it wasn't too far of a drop, despite it being a drop six times his height. With a simple lean forward, the boy flipped out of the window and fell into a crumpled mess in the snow drift, cushioned by the crush of ice beneath him. It was cold, but Chauhn was too overwhelmed with other emotions to really notice it. Wrenching himself free from an early grave of snow and sleet, Chauhn carefully crushed his way through the snow drift and alongside the curve of the stone wall, looking very carefully with his swirling eyes even though the focus and blur of his sight made it nearly impossible to pick out any details in the snow that weren't the darker image of his bare feet in the snow. So what little time it took for him to discover the tell-tale ash trail might have granted the Plague a head start, but there was no escaping from him, not with that trail to lead him straight to where the little pest might have run off to. Secretly, Chauhn knew that the Plague wouldn't have that far to run before he was slowed down and ultimately weakened by the cold. Killing it would be little more than a chore at that point, and Chauhn relished in the idea of squishing the little body into a black pulp between his fingers. He would make sure that the job was well done because that's what a Clemmings did. A Clemmings was a hard worker and always completed the job to the best of his ability, and that was what Chauhn was going to do in the extermination of the little thing that claimed to be his brother.
It was revenge.
So delirious he was with the idea of revenge, that it took Chauhn a couple moments, shivering and huddled underneath Jin-Ho's cloak, standing on numb bare feet along a thin snow path while the growing winds whipped at him, for him to realize that the trail of ash had abruptly stopped. Furrowing his brows, which took more effort than it should have, he knelt down into the snow and fingered through the drift, looking and sifting the white ice for the little body of the Ash Plague. He wasn't there. Chauhn, giving a monstrous gurgle of confusion, spluttered a few intelligible questions, digging about him deeper and deeper in the snow for the Plague that had somehow escaped him. There was no way that he could have just disappeared like that, he had to be around here somewhere, passed out in the snow and too cold to move, helpless, begging to be killed! Chauhn sat back for a moment, his mind performing drunken somersaults as he tried to digest this new turn of events. There had to be some explanation, some place the little imp had gone...He couldn't just escape, Chuahn had a duty to do! he owed it to his family to kill the thing that killed them! He had to...
Chauhn noticed the imprints of feet in the snow. The cogs of his brain swiveled into place and started again at their mad whirling.
Someone had to have discovered him, picked him up, and for a moment, Chauhn dreaded that the footprints might have led back into the Fellowship compound, but upon closer inspection, the footprints, of which there were two sets, scurried off away from the buildings towards the surrounding bare forest. Struggling to hold a twitching grin onto his face, like holding up a fish out of water, Chauhn picked himself up, tripped, yanked himself up again and started his drunken swagger after the footsteps, grinning with psychotic contentment and wheezing with sounds of fear that bubbled up from the suppressed scared version of himself deep within the nauseous swirl of his stomach.
Chauhn had his family to avenge and he wouldn't be assuaged until he had turned his hands black with his blood.
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Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2011 8:42 pm
.. . . . ]| Home is Where the Hearth is |[ . . . ..Having fled to the Malt brothers for safety, Clurie begs Adal and Georgie to spirit him away as far as possible from Chauhn's deadly intent of revenge. They are not quick enough however, somehow still frozen by the Shyregoadian tundra, and by the time that the heat from Chauhn's rage melts them from their stupor, it might have already been too late. .. . . . ..
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Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 11:22 pm
Der Pestdoktor THE PLIGHT OF CLURIE CLEMMINGS
[ meeting ] +[ growth quest ] + + + + + +Amiss the flood of pyre and pricks, wood continued to smolder and crackle as it always had, yet whilst threads of fire dissipated from sight, something wobbled and rekindled in the heart of the hearth. Amidst the sobs and cantankerous, pitiful attempts of making the fire disappear, almost as if the disappearance of warmth threatened its small, burning abode, something shook violently within the fire. Then, as the fire bent in under itself and formed a specter of autumn hues around the shivering mass of charcoal wood, the iron fence of the hearth cracked and bent in towards the ash as if bowing to an emperor's throne.
Instantaneously, a plume of ash exploded from the center of the begrimed mass, flicks of fire lighting each bit as they danced in rhythmic patterns around the hearth, tiny specks of orange light that snapped and curtsied around each other like pixies. A familiar, lighthearted and childish voice, though tinted with burning anguish, echoed through the room like a passing wind. The burning ashes, which were now fluttering around the entire lodge, seemed to freeze in place, flickering light bowing in and out of consciousness. Quickly, surges of violent wind swirled about the room as the scream hitched and broke into several voices, a tidal wave of wails, and the ash recollected at the center of the hearth in a single, bright form, swallowed in an orange, fragile glow.
The glowing form, which was huddling in on itself, arched its slender back against the edge of the hearth. Lazily, quietly, bits of ash falling from it in tiny flakes, the childlike body placed two clawed hands over the iron fence and crawled its way out of the hearth. The orange glow started to fade, however, as it made a heaving breath, tired panting, ash falling more and more rapidly from it as it trailed its way away from the hearth, until it came to reveal a boy, scraggly and pale, with ash caked around its cheeks and strange hands.
Hearth's fire now gone, the only gapes of light came from the burning orange crackles that surrounded its cheeks and palms, and the three boys watched in an insecure daze. In the heart of the winter, Clurie, after having realized the insecurities latched with being the fake husk of Chauhn's younger brother, now dead, comes to the revelation that he is not the same as Clurie Clemmings, and must accept his own life as a Plague and as an individual. Upon hearing this, his Grimm's fury leads to what was expected to be his death, but life seems to have a different route for this newly grown Quietus.Congratulations Storei on achieving this shop's first Stage III growth, and thank you for your dramatic display of unique dramatization and character development. We look forward to seeing what you do!
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