nor every partialness beats one entirety
Word Count: 1748
The foolishness of it hammered in his head like a dull drumbeat. Idiot, it murmured, its triple-beat thrummed soft against his brain case. He knew the poor choice of it for how he was lost to these lands for weeks, searching past forever for a crumb of food and a drop of drink to stop his bones from burrowing through his meat like hungry maggots. He walked with purpose to that drumbeat, that fear, as shadowed walls died out to the great wasteland known as the Rift.
The Rift sprawled vast, eating up the landscape with every whim of Metallia. Monsters' desolate towns sprung up in place of the ruined city that once served here, in this inexplicable cavern — creatures crawled into all the holes left behind. This was the New World. This was the blueprint to Metallia's dominion. This was their goal. Not a new order of man, not a return to natural environments, but a wasteland sucked dry of life's vibrant energy. And for all the ways that draining electricity worked so poorly, they wanted soul energy. The youma, then, were at fault for the craggy lack of all life. How true to man's destructive tendencies.
The simmer in his nerves grew with every step away from the Citadel's imposing figure. The wastelands with their bent doors and broken arches crept ever closer. Their youma, monstrous in their sinewy, undulating forms, peered with brightened eyes from all the corners he found. He approached only the closest.
"You." Spoken with enough authority, the single word would have commanded attention — were it from a general. The lemuresque youma paid him no heed, however, and busied itself among the broken sherds of pottery long forgotten.
As Faustite came further forward, he loomed into that purview. He crouched, and having arrested the creature's attention, pulled a notebook from his vest pocket. Splayed on one of the pages was a rough sketch of a squid with Bic pen colorings for its myriad spots. "Find me this," he urged, the pen cap rapping against the image.
The youma seized the notebook with its grasping paws and turned the image this way and that. It leaned close, looking at the way the notebook lines intersected with the drawn lines, then stretched its arms out as far as they allowed. A few chitters escaped it. Around them, other youma began showing interest. Simple curiosities at first — eyes and heads peering from beyond the crumbled darkness to see what brought new life into this dull domain. Then his chosen youma announced a resounding squeak and took off, notebook thumping smartly against the ground while it bounded.
Faustite's only choice was to follow as quickly as he could. Two legs ill-matched to four; even if his captain's speed carried him, Faustite pushed himself to stay abreast of his newly hired search party. And even with impetus pushing him forward, skepticism burned for all the treachery he faced with his last visit. It curled its knowing hands around the core of him and constricted ever tighter while the Citadel's watch began to wane. Soon, only his memory would guide him back to this place. But if he was ambushed again —
The lemur dodged right and he followed, granting a wide berth to what looked like a boulder. But as a low rumble chased through their feet, humming the bones of his ankles, he looked back to watch great crustacean legs lift the boulder off the ground. That rock worked like the home of a hermit crab. And had he no mission before him, he would've stopped to stare.
But their chase went on through the winding valleys in the Rift, cutting through narrow canyons and tracing the side of a ravine. They met a second broken town near the dismally familiar river and his lemur companion slipped inside. Faustite slowed as he stepped within the outskirts of the ruins. Where stone walls rose as last protective bastions, they concealed just as well the waiting youma that called these places home. He couldn't afford a second stay with the Rift's hospitality; the grip on his guts tightened.
A hand reached out to grasp his ankle and Faustite nearly broke his teeth on biting back a yelp. Again, the lemur circled back to him, this time impatient with his hesitation. And as he watched that hand retreat back to the notebook, as he saw the rhythmic creature bound through a narrow hole in a great inner wall, he steeled himself enough to follow. But the hole itself would permit only someone of his size without the extra hardware. Trying to squeeze through promised he would bend his pipes and break his own ribs. Still, the youma demonstrated remarkably little patience; he'd have to try surmounting the wall and hope it wasn't guarding a roof on the other side.
Over the wall he leapt, and while still suspended in the air, he saw the creature of his choosing. Curled into the collapsed remains of a single-person structure, the squid youma made some loose approximation of a nest. But the nest promised some intelligence and color recognition — in it sat a number of small, cheap trinkets like Mardi Gras beads, confetti pieces, and colored papers. Every scrap present was blue. Perhaps not all the proper shades to match the youma's body, but enough were there that it disguised the youma's idle state surprisingly well. Faustite nearly missed it but for the lemur creature's excited pointing and chittering.
Faustite brushed away the lemur creature with the notepad acting as its concession. Slowly he approached, wary of every sound to reach his ears — every footfall beat with the drum in his mind — and hyper-vigilant for any movement in the youma. Schörl's cryptic taunts sung their mantras at him. His heartbeat pounded heavy in his ears. Too-watchful eyes glimpsed movements, freezing him, until he found their falsehoods.
When he reached six feet from the youma, it stirred. Starry tentacles whispered from one direction to the next, forming a short fan, before the youma spun itself up into the air. It saw him then — the youmafied captain that attacked it twice — and spread its many limbs into menacing hooks. Froth shot from its mouth with drippings of its bleach-yellowed ink.
Faustite reacted first. He strafed left for distance from that bared mouth and the youma reacted in kind. The two circled until Faustite found the collapsed fragments of house at his back. The creature swelled, tentacles rippling, before a bitter stream shot out of its core at the captain. And while Faustite dashed left again to evade, the fluid splattered off the wall and speckled onto his clothing. Already he faced the first threat.
He stooped long enough to feel frantically on the ground, eyes still locked on his target. Searching fingers found a sizable rock and he threw it at the creature. It struck, soliciting a wretched gurgle, and fell to the floor with no obvious effect. The youma righted its slow careen.
Slowly the youma crept closer, tentacles still bared. Again it launched its viscous spray and struck its target squarely. It bubbled once more, and assuming its own victory, began swimming out toward the edge of teh collapsed city.
But soaked as he was, Faustite approach, His clothing dragged him down as anchors do, dripping his path across the ground. The ink's sharp pungency reached his nose with the same breathless expectation as accelerant. The youma drifted and he broke into a run. His sleeves shifted their grip on him. His vest plastered against his chest in hugged warning. He forced away the imminent thoughts for his safety, and when more came, he gritted his teeth against the chosen outcome.
When there's nothing left to burn, she whispered in his ear. He left the thought half-finished.
The youma managed half a turn before he caught it by a pair of legs. Wriggling, it burbled and wrenched and spasmed in its fight for retreat. Faustite held fast; he dragged the pair of them to the ground until he could pin the creature beneath him, for moments only, for as long as his resolve held and his strength aided him, for as long as he could justify the sacrifice for subjugating this once-person. He felt its wetness ooze over his hands and he bit nails into the creature's soft exterior for purchase. And, when he was certain that the squid's ink pressed liberally into its body, he blew out his smoke.
A roiling fireball shot up immediately, engulfing the pair, and Faustite managed only a second of non-feeling before flames licked and sucked at his skin. Before this greedy lover devoured his nerves and left him screaming his pain into the writhing youma beneath him. The heat ate at him, sucking out all the air, leaving him gasping. Leaving the youma struggling all the more as its moisture left it cracked and vulnerable. Rivulets of dust soon burst out of the gaps in its skin. But the heat burned on and it trapped them effortlessly.
In a desperate effort, Faustite refreshed his uniform. It cleared off the brunt of the ink though flame still burned off the youma as it chewed through the rest of its ink. "Submit," he hissed through the flame. The drum in his head reached fever-pitch. Flame wicked and burnt through cloth once more, cooking the skin beneath it.
Finally the youma relented. While it continued to struggle against pain, it no longer bubbled and spat at its accuser. Soon, even the flames gave out, and they each lay in a heap of their own half-seared flesh. Moisture then returned to the creature, a needful boon against Faustite's overheated and overcooked body, and he wiped one of the creatures tentacles across his face and neck.
They needed to move, he knew. He needed to retreat to the Citadel before youmakind perceived his injury and encroached on him. He needed to lay in a cold bath before his skin continued to cook beyond repair. And as he pried himself off the ground, skin too tight and pain stiffening every muscle group, he watched the youma shift before his eyes. Before he returned to the safety of the Citadel, the thousand glimmers of blue in the youma's body shifted steadily, but unstoppably, toward orange. He would've smiled if he thought his lips wouldn't crack.
