Into Putrefying Fire (Solo)

Three weeks had gone by since that queer old man barged into the store with his dreaded wooden chest. Fainting at the touch of a big, black jewel on some mysterious crown (“a diadem,” Zampano cried, spittle flying) was not a regular shopkeeping occurrence. It was slightly alarming, but Amihan merely sniffed at the inconvenient loss of consciousness. Once before, a sting from a whining entomologist’s maddened wasp gave her blistering rashes up the arm. Another time, a wandering wizard’s enchanted mirror seemed a wonderful high-ticket item for luxury clients, until the glass began emitting an obnoxious odour that Amihan could not wash out of her hair for weeks. Products passing through Grasshopper’s lived in the fringes, and so a little personal safety was collateral.

Which was the thought that Amihan had in her mind, as her vision began blurring. The movements of the light filtering through the dust in the store crossed her mind, as she placed her hands on to the wooden cash counter. She had been manning the desk, while her father Mikael unloaded a shipment of knobs, gears and gadgetry. Her other father Natsuki was somewhere off grumbling as he performed his daytime errands.

A sudden, lancing headache breached across her skull, the spray showering her brain in sizzling impurity. She gritted her teeth. She felt like she was blinking out of space, as if she was being washed away figment by figment, into another, sub-imposed existence, like phantom puzzle pieces in our regular understanding of the whole. Like water splashing against the portholes of a ship.

“Uhhh… Dad…,” she said, her voice raised in an uncertain croak.

Amihan could feel a deep rumbling within her psyche. Her mind seemed a vast, black ocean, wider and deeper than any lesser being could see or comprehend. And she was simply a drop in the distance. A behemoth-form lurked in the shadows of that lurid blackness, obscurity seemed to it a great, and useful asset. Headaches like these were far from those of hunger or thirst or complaining customer situations – Amihan noted the unnatural enmity of it all.

“Hey, Dad…”

“What, I’m doin’ something over here,” he called out from the back room, his voice deafened behind towers of cardboard boxes.

A roar resonated throughout the store; the sound was so loud, Mikael was thrown to the floor in surprise. Cogs and lugs of varying sizes spilt on to the concrete, rolling around every which way. “What the fu-…”

The sounded carried horribly through the rest of the Ettermire market, scaring all the flocks of shit-brained rock pigeons into the smog of a cloudless day. The crash of ceramics, weaponry and various adventuring merchandise rushed Mikael on to the salesfloor. What in the Thayne’s name was that? Amihan was collapsed behind the counter, with nosebleeds from both nostrils. She was no sickly, frail thing growing up; the blood was rusty red. Mikael’s palms went cold and his stomach knotted into great, cosmic tanglings. The heaving throats of smoke and fire towering across the steaming techno-capital of Alerar pulsed on, unabated and ignorant.