Callisto

Dreams of the Changeling (pt. 1)

He ran with a field of green beneath him.

He knew the grass wasn't natural, and yet he felt pure exhilaration with every leap and bound over the verdant plants and fauna in the lab garden.

"Jespar!" she called. "Dinner time!"

His ears perked up, and he felt his stomach growl menacingly. He followed his nose to the scent of his favorite dish: she had made him fresh noodles with meatballs. The good stuff.

He came through the door flap, and the little electronic buzzer chimed that announced his entry like the fanfare of a king coming home to his castle. He nosed some meatballs around on his dish, savoring their smell, before he sat down to chew.

Damn, he thought. Didn't realize I was this hungry.

He felt her hand caress the small of his back, and a shiver went down his spine. If any other scientists in the bunker had interrupted his meal time, he'd have snapped off a piece of them and added it to his feast. But not with her. She'd always been there.

He looked up with a face slathered in sauce and meat.

"Hey, Nicole," he said.

She giggled, her blonde curls dangling down over her lab coat. Those turquoise eyes, with the little dark bags under them - the first thing he ever saw in this world – those eyes beamed down at him, full of love and complete trust in who he was. In what he was.

"Welcome home, Jespar," she said.

...

The sky was streaked with crimson.

Not the same crimson that sometimes painted the twilight canvas of sky above the Deadlands – these were the smeared red of bloodied tears, freshly wept.

Rain-Born lay in a pool of these red tears, floating in an ever-flowing sea of vermillion. She could feel it seep into her hair and skin and stain the vibrant chalk white of her sacred tattoos.

She rose with a start and clawed at her arms to remove the liquid that slowly corrupted her entire being. But it was a futile effort – her hands merely came away from her skin covered in more of the pumping fluid that crawled up her body like a spreading infection.

She found herself at the base of a hill surrounded by this vile body of fluid. Gestating waves flowed unnaturally upwards as though goading her to climb the slope. And there was someone up there, waiting for her. Though she did not know how she knew they were there – a shadow beckoning to her in the ancient tongue of the Hanakh.

Something soft and sticky hampered her movement, and at her attempts to wade through the shallow pool of blood, she felt her feet sink into something heavy. It took a pained effort to draw her legs across these obstructions and scale the hill. She grunted as she broke through each object, anchoring her down till she hit something recognizable. And she froze.

She felt long, sinuous fingers grab her ankle.

And the blood-red liquid began to drain away, swallowed by the earth itself.

And she saw a sight that made her knees shake and her heart race. She felt it pound like a war drum in her throat, and her breaths were reduced to ragged, asthmatic bursts.

The blood slowly sunk beneath the parched land and revealed hairless skulls, eyes sunken and empty, broken bones and limbless bodies, toothless mouths open and infested with maggots and torsos punctured by spears and arrows or charred by flame.

The dark, barren earth beneath her was littered with the corpses of Hanakh and Guthra - warriors, shamans, mothers, and babes. They clung to each other with screaming maws, bowed their heads in prayer, or reached out their skeletal, eviscerated hands to Rain-Born in final desperate cries for aid. Rain-Born saw children whose scalps had been torn from their heads, brain matter oozing into their ears, and melted eyes dangling from their sockets. The buzzards of the wastes had fed on the innards of those who had fallen – for she saw the long strings of the intestines that trailed away from the open cavities cut into the stomachs of the dead. The scent of desiccated corpses clung to the air and strangled Rain-Born's senses until she felt faint and dropped to her knees before the sight. They were all dead. Mutilated and beaten, chewed and buried under the sea formed from the quivering tears wept by their own severed veins. Everyone she had ever known – friend and foe.