The two PFCs were scheduled to depart the larger base in two weeks. Outside of basic drills and daily checkups at the hospital to make sure the perforations they’d suffered weren’t growing into a far reaching mind-control piloted by foreign shards of bone, the boys had been permitted a large amount of leisure time. Kasse felt particularly at home exploring disused buildings, break-and-enter autonomy something he’d been missing in the rigid structure of military life.
It had been three days.
“Sejan, what the fuck are you doing?” He asked, calm amid his resuscitation despite the palpitation of his body’s interior.
Across the room, the last bloodwright standing was the very picture of her father’s rage but so much quicker, long distance devastating. She was no longer a girl, no longer Riki, replaced by a snarling feral shriek of grief when she laid another cluster of darts so locust plague thick across her sightline that nine of them struck true, no less than five shredding through her target’s thigh. They found bone to attach themselves to, crude projectiles transformed into living barnacles in lapsed time, calcifying tongues flaying muscle from femur, digging into hairline fractures till they could taste the marrow of the sergeant’s bones.
A flash of dying light caught the corner of Eoran’s eye like an albino glimmer cutting fractions from the molecularity of their shared air. The boy’s head snapped sideways, but it had always been too late. A man flew into the room from the stairwell, hair a tear of night against the forever fraying day, […]
As he waited, Eoran’s mind implored him to prepare himself for eventualities. It urged him to not ignore the plethora of possibility and every reality the early evening held close to its mirage-mottled breast. The boy found that his positivity tended to be a resilient thing. His parents found him foolish in how he shirked any duty deigned beneath him under the assumption that it would just work out. So, then, why was he being so negative? Why were his lungs heavy with sentiments best collected by necrographers?
Brint leaned against the alley’s left wall, twisting his torso so the brunt of his weight was funneled onto his good arm. Slow, careful movements made it possible for him to lift the barrel of his rifle to the empty avenue in case something hostile decided to come stalking down its length. Eoran took up a position next to him, observing the spaces his sergeant’s eyes ignored.
Amstead’s army pressed ever onward across the Ossan landscape. A mountain range loomed to the north, breaking the horizon in a blend of reds and blues, hazy but nevertheless hungry—a hateful challenge always threatening, a topographical tear along the lacquertops of desk-tethered generals overseeing the arrangement of their ground forces. In the vast plateau before that change in elevation, towns and villages lay scattered. These hideaways were known to harbor insurgents masquerading as humble civilians; full of first time mothers claiming boys who, by traditional approximation, were not even close to being related. Any house became a safe house for Ossa’s guerilla rebellion, so Amstead saw fit to discourage such an effort with artillery. Gifts rained from the skies. First in propagandic flyers from unarmed single engine props, then in a flurry of shelling accented with the rapid chittering of cannon fire from low-altitude death dealers. The invading forces left the red clay plastered and pockmarked, then she sent in her clean-up crews.
Mom, they’re sending me to Ossa tomorrow, Eoran Toriet’s letter began. He sat hunched over a low table that spread long to either side of him, left hand compiling his thoughts in a flurry of slapdash penmanship scrawled onto the sloppy and warped pages of a notebook that had seen much better days.
The bloodwright prodigy, heir to the Toriet’s bloodwright burden and their archaic blood God of mercy, closed his eyes and sighed. “What do I need to do?”