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I do not know how long I kneel upon the damp concrete floor listening to the crackle and spark of the flickering overhead lights and the shattered consoles, the monotonous drip of the exhausted overhead sprinklers; counting the corpses, smelling the blood, and wondering at how Jewels managed to warn these rodents of my coming.
Long enough, certainly, for my lesser injuries to heal: for the shattered scales and riven flesh on my arms and chest to regrow and my strength to begin to return. Long enough to imagine a truly horrific fate for Jewels, and for the corpulent coward who, sensibly, fled from my wrath while I was yet unable to pursue.
Long enough to ponder why, as I rest crippled, in a room full of broken machinery with only one exit, there has been no further attempt to subdue me - and to conclude that it does not matter.
These scheming simians have lost their opportunity, and it will never come again.
Stray arcs of astral charge crackle across the blackened pit in my midsection as I stand. The injury burns as I move, flakes of charred flesh breaking off and falling to the floor, and a growl rumbles deep in my throat. My healing abilities are accelerating, growing in time with my burgeoning astral furnace, but I can still feel the itch of the scars upon my glorious countenance, the aches within my peerless flesh. And of course, my gut-wound still gapes: a singularity of pain, a hideous blot upon a field of effulgent gold.
As I shift my weight, testing my balance, my talons clack and scrape on the battle-scarred floor. Water continues to drip from the ceiling. I flex my clawed hands, feeling the crisp tightness of the freshly-knitted flesh, and I stalk towards the door.
It is a matter of moments to climb the stairs (a contrivance which I have never in all my eons of life had to personally bother with before), scant seconds more to cross the strange, empty room at the top, obliterate the lonely piece of furniture it holds with a shrieking bolt of cosmic power, and step through the empty frames of the front doors, shattered glass crunching harmlessly beneath my talons.
I emerge beneath an overcast sky, framed by the looming rim of a volcanic crater. The air is cold, filled with the acid smell of old concrete and a tang that I cannot identify. The street, save for a few dark stains, is empty.
A moment of dissociation washes over me: I have only ever previously experienced a city from this perspective when gazing through another’s eyes, reaching telepathically across light-years to puppeteer the body of some lesser creature in preparation for my grand, apocalyptic arrival. Being here in person, looking up at a row of featureless concrete buildings considerably less than fifty stories high, is a novel experience.
I sneer; Not entirely featureless. The inhabitants, it seems, have decorated their pitiful hive. The street-level facades of nearly every looming tenement are enrobed in graven images, bright colors washed to faded hues by weather, dirt and the sun. Some of them are even labeled in a more traditional sense, although many of the technological gimmicks, flickering holograms and neon strips, do not seem to be functioning well. From my accustomed stature, such details would pass entirely unnoticed.
Curious, I stalk up and down the boulevard, taking in the murals. I study them carefully, the way the one picture flows into the other, layers upon layers, as interconnected as the lives that produced them - and then I begin raking the walls with crackling blasts of golden lightning. The sense of satisfaction as the artwork is erased forever from the face of universe, reduced to meaningless entropy and concrete shrapnel, is almost enough to make me forget the pain in my gut, to take my thoughts the growing puzzlement in the back of my mind.
Where are all the people? The group of sad, dead gunmen that I left in the ruined basement cannot have been the entire population of this place.
As much as I am enjoying the opportunity to indulge myself, it just isn’t quite the same without a fleeing populace. It lacks context; more than that, it suggests that there is something else present in this settlement (it is not really large enough to call it a city) that is of greater concern than me.
Long enough, certainly, for my lesser injuries to heal: for the shattered scales and riven flesh on my arms and chest to regrow and my strength to begin to return. Long enough to imagine a truly horrific fate for Jewels, and for the corpulent coward who, sensibly, fled from my wrath while I was yet unable to pursue.
Long enough to ponder why, as I rest crippled, in a room full of broken machinery with only one exit, there has been no further attempt to subdue me - and to conclude that it does not matter.
These scheming simians have lost their opportunity, and it will never come again.
Stray arcs of astral charge crackle across the blackened pit in my midsection as I stand. The injury burns as I move, flakes of charred flesh breaking off and falling to the floor, and a growl rumbles deep in my throat. My healing abilities are accelerating, growing in time with my burgeoning astral furnace, but I can still feel the itch of the scars upon my glorious countenance, the aches within my peerless flesh. And of course, my gut-wound still gapes: a singularity of pain, a hideous blot upon a field of effulgent gold.
As I shift my weight, testing my balance, my talons clack and scrape on the battle-scarred floor. Water continues to drip from the ceiling. I flex my clawed hands, feeling the crisp tightness of the freshly-knitted flesh, and I stalk towards the door.
It is a matter of moments to climb the stairs (a contrivance which I have never in all my eons of life had to personally bother with before), scant seconds more to cross the strange, empty room at the top, obliterate the lonely piece of furniture it holds with a shrieking bolt of cosmic power, and step through the empty frames of the front doors, shattered glass crunching harmlessly beneath my talons.
I emerge beneath an overcast sky, framed by the looming rim of a volcanic crater. The air is cold, filled with the acid smell of old concrete and a tang that I cannot identify. The street, save for a few dark stains, is empty.
A moment of dissociation washes over me: I have only ever previously experienced a city from this perspective when gazing through another’s eyes, reaching telepathically across light-years to puppeteer the body of some lesser creature in preparation for my grand, apocalyptic arrival. Being here in person, looking up at a row of featureless concrete buildings considerably less than fifty stories high, is a novel experience.
I sneer; Not entirely featureless. The inhabitants, it seems, have decorated their pitiful hive. The street-level facades of nearly every looming tenement are enrobed in graven images, bright colors washed to faded hues by weather, dirt and the sun. Some of them are even labeled in a more traditional sense, although many of the technological gimmicks, flickering holograms and neon strips, do not seem to be functioning well. From my accustomed stature, such details would pass entirely unnoticed.
Curious, I stalk up and down the boulevard, taking in the murals. I study them carefully, the way the one picture flows into the other, layers upon layers, as interconnected as the lives that produced them - and then I begin raking the walls with crackling blasts of golden lightning. The sense of satisfaction as the artwork is erased forever from the face of universe, reduced to meaningless entropy and concrete shrapnel, is almost enough to make me forget the pain in my gut, to take my thoughts the growing puzzlement in the back of my mind.
Where are all the people? The group of sad, dead gunmen that I left in the ruined basement cannot have been the entire population of this place.
As much as I am enjoying the opportunity to indulge myself, it just isn’t quite the same without a fleeing populace. It lacks context; more than that, it suggests that there is something else present in this settlement (it is not really large enough to call it a city) that is of greater concern than me.