Young Writers Society

The peace treaty was truly gone.

The realization was much sharper this time, and it allowed Del an unfortunate time to think.

The peace treaty was the only thing that had kept him safe. He was allowed into the city, and when the green light of the army occasionally swallowed the buildings, he could rub his eyes in relief that the soldiers’ footsteps weren’t headed for him.

Now that a Parasite had killed the Angel, the ruler of the upper thirds of Midnight, the treaty was shattered like the walls of Del’s former home. Before, as long as the Parasites didn’t kill a human, a peace —no matter how shaky— had been promised. It was now null and blank, and a promise of death.

A bitter taste filled Del’s mouth along with the sand. He walked silently among the countless hills of gray, eyes fixated on the sky mindlessly. The sand made patterns around him that brushed against his face soothingly. He let the small gray particles swim through his fingers, drowning him. He still knew that the desert was the only safe place on the continent. And he had only lived in the city because of Ren. The others made home in these gray raging waves with no destination and no starting point.

It was one of the times when his emotions and thoughts went only into his head. His chest was cold, and his limbs were now a part of the Gris; gray with no destination. There were sharp things that raged inside his brain, tugging at his eyes, the base of his neck—

It was too numb. He wished to sit down where he stood and beat at his heart, demanding why it wasn’t responding to his wills, asking hesitantly if it was dying. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to, grappling with a fear of sinking into the gray sand and wondering for all the time there was to pass.

With hills of thoughts joining with the gray desert, he walked, stumbled, limped, walked. One gust of wind blew, carrying sand, and he was falling back, ragged breaths escaping through his teeth, then standing up again. Another blade of sand cut through him, and he bent down, frowning, yet kept moving himself forward. The hills changed shapes as he walked. The sky was a strange shade of blue and gray. Clouds shifted slowly, languidly, swimming across the sky, nothing binding them. They were heavy and thick, and acted as if it were going to rain. Yet Del knew that it never rained in the Gris.

The sand dunes had transformed into different shapes countless times when Del saw a flash of white among the dead ashes of life and plants. He briefly considered a possibility of hallucinating terribly, then blindly staggered to the bright color. The sand was blowing into his eyes and throat, yet he could still walk, which he now considered a curse and hope at the same time.

When Del took his eleventh step, he found himself on the ground. Something had barreled into him, driving edges —not blades but sharp enough— into his chest. He shuddered in shock for a second, then managed to regain a part of himself that had been drowned away by the gray sand before. With a grunt, he pushed off the thing and let out a hurried breath before he saw a knife being pushed to his eyes. For a second, he held in the air in his lungs, and lay still like an ice statue. Then the tip of the knife slowly turned, as if it were a rusty piece of machinery, and the blade headed back to its owner. Del breathed out, attempting to get a sense of what was happening around him.

A gloved hand grabbed Del’s forearm roughly and tugged him up. “Another city-dweller,” the owner of the hand yelled. Del blinked heavily and realized that the man had white hair and eyes, exactly like himself.

It felt as if he could breathe again. His head and chest connected for the first time in a while, and he coughed into a hand, curling into himself slightly.

When Del regained his balance, the man let go of him. A pair of white eyes stared coldly into Del’s. “Have you heard the news?” The man demanded.

“Yes, I have, yes,” Del responded instantly, only remembering to breathe when his words came to an end.

The man’s eyes narrowed, and he shook Del’s shoulders hard. “Get focused. It would have happened sooner or later.”

“Right.”

“What did you see in the city?”

Del opened his mouth, and things that he hadn’t known he could put into words burst forth like a broken water faucet. Ren, the green light, the army, and the Parasites that were working with the army. When his mouth slowly closed, he felt the stabbing pain in his head calm. Inhaling deeply, he straightened up more and knew that his eyes were now more like those of the man that stood in front of him.

“Listen,” the man snapped, walking toward a sand dune. Del followed him. “Are you listening?”

“I am.”

“Our only hope is joining the others in the continent. There will be more of us as we head down from the Angel’s lands.”

Surprisingly, the man’s voice managed to soothe Del. He nodded along and reached the top of the sand hill. Beneath him, he saw a dozen Parasites that were waiting in place for something — the man, Del realized. At the front of the group was a tall man, who was looking off to the distance, his back facing Del.

When Del and the man approached, the tall man turned. His eyes were white, yet glimmering in a thousand colors, seemingly facing this way then the other. It was like the eyes were reaching out and tugging Del forward. Del’s mouth parted slightly, and he took a step back, his eyes slowly shifting into a glare. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head before he looked at the tall man again. Now there was not even a hint of the glow.

The man smiled at Ren, spreading his hands slightly. “I’m sorry. My ability is in my eyes. And yours…”

After a moment of suspicious hesitation, Del sighed and replied, “My blood.”

The man raised an eyebrow, and his lips formed a sentence that Del couldn’t quite read. Something akin to a snake’s slither raced over Del’s body, and his feet screamed at him to turn and go back. With a fair amount of difficulty, Del shook off the cold feeling. Before he could think more deeply of what the man had said, the man nodded, seemingly to himself. “I’m Leed.”

“Del.”

Again, Leed nodded. The eerie slither ran over Del’s body again, and instead of pushing it down, he took a slight step back. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t a feeling but a sound. The slithering got louder, and Del stared at the dunes of sand, wondering if the slither was simply in his imagination or if it was something else that he should have noticed.

Leed turned around and fixated his gaze on somewhere afar. As he did, he muttered absently, “Since we will need every one of us we can gather, I am very thankful for your appearance—That you’ve decided to come out of those cities…”

Del stiffened, and attempted to ignore the way that Leed had said ‘cities’. “Certainly,” he replied, and waited a moment. “Are you going to tell me what I have to do?”

“Just follow us,” Leed told him, the smile now gone from his voice, and instead covered by concentration. “The sky is much clearer today. With this view, I certainly can see the army… Actually, right now…“ His voice was fading in Del’s ears. Slowly, slowly, overtaken by a cold, uncomfortable bug, eating away at his feet. Something was slithering, sliding, hissing, running its tongues and fingers and scales all over Del, and he was suffocating in it, vivid yet dull, lingering, still blunt—

“Leed, look here,” he heard himself say, “Look here, now, quick!”

—The slither then swallowed him whole.

Silent figures with white hair slid down from the sand dunes that soon became giants over their heads. Del stumbled back, while Leed spewed out curses and threw Del a machete. Without thoughts, Del’s fingers closed around the blade’s handle. The end of his nails turned white, and his lungs suddenly exploded with air. It was a white firework of glee, drawing bright curves and spirals—white, white, as white as his hair, as pale as his eyes, as ivory as his bones, trembling, shrieking for movement. He stared, then complied. He was moving. He was sliding. He was jumping. And he was breathing in agony, happily, horrifyingly alive, or was it, was it horrifying?, perhaps it was the city that had changed him, and this wasn’t horrifying at all…

With the jarring sound of impact, Del’s arms blocked a strike that came from above. His whole body shivered, and he widened his eyes before he threw off the attacker and adjusted his grip on the machete.

“Traitors!” A voice screamed, then abruptly faded away into the Gris.

The gray sand whipped around Del’s body. He was breathing hard, and his throat was burning one moment then freezing from the veins of ice that came from his chest. With the dark sky and the sand turning sharper and digging into his senses, he felt as if his whole being was being crushed by the world.

Shaking internally, he raised the machete and leveled it at the Parasite that stood in front of him. It was a slim woman, with long eyes that drew a sharp curve across her face. Her arms shimmered into a black color, and long spikes protruded through her skin. When she struck again, the machete snapped in half with a loud, ringing sound that was the scream of the blade. Del, his hands shaking from the impact of his machete breaking, jumped back as the woman swung her arm once more.

Del’s body failed him to dodge the next strike, and his left shoulder exploded in a shower of blood. Hissing lowly, he staggered back, cradling his injury. The fire spread slowly throughout his entire left side, and the orange tongues licked at the edges of his brain. Narrowing his eyes, Del sprinted at the woman the same time that she did. As his feet pounded the gray sand beneath him, his head was painfully blank. A numbness of being unable to retort properly spread through his chest.

The woman’s blackened hands reached out swiftly. Del bent back until his back bent and stretched into a level of aching discomfort. He wrapped his legs around the woman’s arms, and tightened them, feeling his muscles strain and shake from a long time of abandonment.

With her eyes flashing like those of a giant cat, the woman dug her feet into the sand and stood firmly. Then she parted her pale lips to show her teeth. For a moment, Del stared at her, puzzled, and couldn’t stop himself from taking in a curt breath that failed to pass through his throat. The woman’s teeth lengthened into fine points. She bit at Del’s ankles, who let go as if he had been burned by lava.

“You,” Del rasped out, and jumped onto his feet, swaying lightly. “You! How?”

The woman took a step forward, and in the same instant, a hand tugged Del back. Leed’s voice growled by his ear, “What have they done to themselves?”

“How—” Del’s breathing shook terribly as Leed let go of the collar of his shirt. “Leed, explain—”

“Use your ability!” Leed snapped at him instead. His eyes were glowing again, and there was blood smudged onto his fine hair. “The blood!”

Del stared down at his own bloodied torso. He willed the crimson liquid to move into the air, yet there was a scorching fire burning his insides, gnawing away at his bones, and he simply couldn’t think straight. Breathing heavily, Del rubbed the blood with his hands, and attempted to make it move. It only wavered slightly on his palms.

“Do it!” Leed was shouting, his voice a mix of desperation, rage and the ice from the depths of the Gris. He swung glinting blades all around him, fending off two men.

Clenching his teeth, Del closed his eyes and murmured to himself calming words, soothing promises, then shuddered for one last time. When he snapped his eyes open, the blood was wrapped around the woman's neck and lifting her into the air.

It gave Del a time to take in a gasping breath. Panting painfully, he frantically turned his head to examine the passing storm around him.

There were crumpled bodies on the ground. Numerous heads with white hair were drenched in blood. And in the second when Del realized that only one of the Parasites that were fallen was from the government, things were rushing at him too fast.

A bullet ripped through Del’s side, and he staggered forward, holding in a shocked scream. The burning roared up into a fire that was so much more bigger, and dropped straight into the middle of the raging flame, Del crumbled onto one knee. His eyes were melting. His tongue was being scorched dry like the cracked ground of summer. Fire enveloped his heart and ripped through his veins. Beside him, Leed gave a short grunt.

Shaking, Del raised his head. Leed’s blades cut through the air like the wind. The sand flew up all around him, and his eyes gave a last glint before the Parasites of the army swarmed him and all Del could see were dark uniforms.

In a cold agony that grappled with the heat, Del recalled that Leed had been faster and stronger, swifter and lighter. When he decided to go to the cities, Del hadn’t realized that his decision would place ice onto his limbs and freeze his muscles into those that were close to a human’s. He glanced at his blood, then the Parasites that were advancing.

“Traitors,” Del spat out the word that he had heard only a split moment before. “Dirty backstabbers.”

A gunshot swallowed his voice. He knew that it was from where Leed was struggling, a bird with its wings snapped, and it forced him to his feet. Another round of gunshots followed, and they sickened him. The sound of bullets from Ren’s pistol and what was now tearing his insides apart overlapped—they all nauseated him to the point where something sour rose from somewhere deep inside him.

He raised his hands and clenched them into fists. His blood flew up from the ground and formed thin, sharp blades in the air. His vision turned half white from his hair flying into his eyes. As quick as a flash of pale lightning, his fingers unclenched, releasing the blades into the Parasites.

There was a short chaos. Not bothering to watch where the blades flew, Del pushed past the men and women, each breath that he took wrecking through his entire body and setting his intestines aflame. He ran and ran.

After a long time, when he stopped and saw that the desert had swallowed him again, he slumped onto the sand and curled into a ball, pressing down on his bleeding side. His teeth ached from being clenched together with a daunting force. Smiling in encouragement, soft winds brushed against his face and enveloped him in an embrace. Then sharp gusts of air dug into his side. Releasing a soft sound through his teeth, Del shuddered in pain.

“Ren,” he muttered, then immediately was disgusted at his tongue having produced such a sound. The gunshots rattled his brain again, and he braced a hand against his forehead, shivering. Through the gaping cracks, his thoughts escaped him once more. “Ren…”

Whispering sweet promises, the desert settled into him, pale and cold as night.