Category: Writers Block
The world has in it no space for breakers, I had said, and you looked at me with that way of knowing things that you have and said that the world had in it a purpose for all of its creatures, even the breakers and the broken. In your voice I heard fire, clean and pure, and in your words I smelled smoke and premonition.
The world has in it a purpose for all of its creatures...
Numb with cold, helpless and watching an eternal enemy advance toward me, I remember those words. On the ground, I remember those words.
I am the breaker, and the world has in it a purpose for me, too.
I can't feel the icy ground beneath my back, the stony soil of this place I will die in,so many miles from my home. Even the air smells different, with a metallic tang that sinks in to your bones. I am too numb to feel the vibration of their approach, but my breaker sense tells me they are there and exactly how they move. With eerie precision I watch them, though I cannot see, and listen to them, though I cannot hear, and follow them, though I lie prone and half-dead beneath a ragged-looking outcropping.
Fire blooms directly above me, splitting the rock down its center, and numbly, the breaker sense ticking like ominous clockwork in my brain, I roll away, somehow manage to stand up, and find myself running. Heat blossoms in my chest, and I swear I can hear the ice in my blood crack. I round a corner in to a narrow canyon and there they are, bedding down for the night, my sister in tow, laughing in their harsh, jangling minor key tongue. Desperation and my purpose drives me forward. I am a machine, nothing but an instrument, in your hands, my purpose.
My hand touches my chest, comes away wet with blood, and contains something tiny, and fiercely-glowing. I raise it to the night, and it ignites like a strip of magnesium, burning a hole in the dark, burning a tear in the fabric of heaven.
And as I bring it back down I whisper a name, my purpose, as I pitch forward, and the world goes up in clean, pure flame. In the sound of those words, I can taste smoke and premonition, blood, and a purpose for all of the creatures the world has in it. The ticking of the braker sense slows, stops entirely, and leaves the world in an echoing silence in the wake of the passing footsteps of time.
I can't see a thing, only the rough surface descending toward me, stained with blood. I can hear the rising falling murmur of the harsh jangling tongue of my nightmares, choppy-sounding and full of stops and starts, playing some song like an off-beat drum. It could not keep the time, I thought numbly, if it tried. No one knows how to use the minor sound anymore, the shadowy spaces inside words, the places where power and voice collide. No one will kill me. I am, to them, an immortal.
My hand inches slowly toward my chest as they talk. I am their example, they'll set my death up wel, spectacularly.
My hand comes away wet with blood, with a tiny, fierce flame in it.
I raise it to the stone above me.
I whisper a name.
The stone snaps in half, disintegrating along the lines of the split, as the light burrows through it.
A moment later, through the choking cloud of ash and dust, I hear screams, and faintly see the bloom of a long white plume of flame, burning a clear path through the thick, stifling air. The ground rumbles for a moment, and everything falls silent.
I stand on a battlefield, at the end of my journey, surveying this last purpose of mine from an outcropping. But something stays my hand, something whispers a chilly premonition in my mind, so I pause, suspended, and can feel time itself holding in a breath.
And I watch.
I watch a man drag a girl to the edge of the fray, burn the mark of his flame on her skin, and leave her there. I watch another take his place. I realize with a start, these are my people. These are on my side.
I watch them pound a stake in to the ground, impale a two-year old girl on it, her screams abruptly cut off as they split the ribs in her back. This is done by the hands I fight beside. This is done by the purpose I fight for.
I watch them stack a pyramid of them, suspiciously small bodies, and prepare to set it alight. These are the voices that swore to me a purpose.
I watch the enemy lines split, as a wave of our own from captured towns is pushed forward, cut apart by a hailstorm of flame and metal before anyone can stop it. This is what we swore to eradicate. Blood calling: the sworn eradication of the chosen target, that which has destroyed the balance and must be righted, only in fire. Only in fire.
I rise and scale down the side of the rock vantage point that was chosen for me.
They have picked someone to go first, this sworn enemy of mine. I know this face, another sister of mine, a face I grew up with, a girl who could never harm a living creature.
I walk out in to the bloody, churned badlands.
They are raising her now, someone holds a scythelike blade.
I break in to a run.
In each footstep I learn a truth. There is no right answer. In fact, there is no answer at all. In the end, there is only flame. Only correction in flame. No one will know what drove me to this. No one will understand the desperation, the fear, the numbing sense of betrayal, the trauma of having seen it all, the hopeless and pathetic creature that came crawling in, begging for a purpose. No one will understand the pain that forces this out of me.
Before anyone can react I am between the pyramid and the man holding my little sister.
I reach a hand to my chest, and it comes away. Wet with blood, and containing a single fierce spark.
I strike a match, and hold it up. Someone runs forward.
I throw the match, and scream a name, my purpose, to the endless, traitor sky.
And raise the spark, for the last time.
There is a purpose for all of the creatures the world has in it.
Yet there are those who destroy without thought, those who have no place, those who have no hope. There is no right way. There is no single direction. There is no path to travel, and no top to the cliff face.
Inside of me, the sudden storm of light is beautiful, clean and silent. The ground splits in slow motion symmetry. Hundreds of people are hurled away from it or sucked in to the rift.
Have I failed you, my traitor sky?
I pitch forward, the name I died for mingling with the blood on my lips, their taste one and the same.
Good try. Thanks for posting.
Feather'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr for president!
Ha, I haven't changed that in years since Amelia was going around saying it. lol
Is this something you've written? If so, it's pretty well done. A little vague at times, but certainly vivid and poetic in others. It's nice to read read a story on h ere. Not that I have anything against poetry, but it seems like the only thing that's posted on here.
I don't know that a story will ever come of it. I've seen more of that character than I wanted to, and he is one poor creature that I think I might have to leave alone.