Eros.
Such a simple name, one bearing little more than four characters, its origin that of complete abstruseness and mystification, an oddity amongst the common mass and even to the labelled youth who held such title. His parents, from what Eros remembered of them, adhered to relatively common names, though what designated epithets had faded from the boy's mind, his retrospection of the pair now little more than a threadbare, bedraggled and lustreless pantomime of fantasised events.
To the boy in question, he believed such a title to hold little value. It was merely a name, one that, although detached and romanesque, gave life and form to his person. However, to the preponderance of espers and the greater macrocosm forged of soil and water, the denomination possessed a different value, an appurtenance of transcendency and pulchritudinous prestige.
"The…prodigy," Fiamma exhaled, her eyes of ruby-red aghast, wonderstruck and confounded, myriad emotions all of which turbulent raging like a tempest amidst her twin gems. It had to be him, the sole male, neigh, sole person to ever awaken at such a young age, the opalescent star of the cosmos turned caliginous and lacklustre.
To receive one's esper ability at the turn of a decade was customary, a monotonous and inconsequential fact known to all, with exiguous, sporadic cases of those reaping their potential beyond such an age, however, to awaken even a year prior to such universal and banal point would herald one as a prodigy, a gift to the world with seemingly limitless potential. Yet, the child before Fiamma could neither be extolled as such nor revered, for in the past, he was a monster, an atypical existence worthy of utmost envy, as though the sin leviathan given body, awakening at the unadulterated age of seven.
"The youngest to ever attain their gift, you're that Eros," She stuttered, the mere act of proclamation a chore for her body to portray. "Why…Why are you here? Shouldn't you be at Enuma academy?" The girl continued, her mind akin to the smouldering apocalypse that brewed in the backdrop all the while, anonymous and unascertained to all, a subdued flurry of effervescent pink painted her mask of ivory.
Upon manifestation of the crimson-haired beauty's words, Eros's smile, once frivolous and fading, could do little more than fracture, like multitudinous panes of glass. Fiamma's question, despite relatively innocent, more akin to a statement, a proclamation of truth, only inspirited his recollection of the memento mori, the heralded death he had thus far managed to circumvent, and more importantly, the emotionalistic apathy the academy enchanted upon his existence. Ten years, his life to the masses was considered an empyrean wonderland for the better portion of a decade. Exempt from the deconsecrated ungodly land of the dungeons and the rigorous, scrupulous sharpening of combat skills, Eros lived when nought but fated cessation hung in the backdrop, waiting, meandering, passing the time until the world lost hope for the boy. He hadn't improved. His ability "Matchmaker" merely gained the erroneous, fictitious alias "Partial Analysis".
"Because I was little more than a fruitless endeavour, an unfounded prophet upon which the academy chose to believe." Eros simpered, crimson-stained sweat pressing upon the precipice of his lips in a coy sensual manner, as though tempting his twin pieces of flesh to partake in the consumption of the strange fluid. The boy had expected nought but the lowering of affection upon such self-deprecating truth, yet, as if attempting to spite him, to throw all his life experience away, Fiamma's preference for the boy only proved to soar.
{+7% Affection}
However, such proclamation penned by the parchment would be met with little more than the same brown hue as usual, no sudden bolt of luminescent pink detonating from the youth's left side. In place of conversation, speechlessness and taciturnity reigned supreme, dominant like a monarch one dared not rebel against. Eros's mind returned to its foregone realm of tempestuous wretched anguish. Once more, he had no idea how much time he had spent incapacitated nor how he and, more importantly, Fiamma could escape such a realm of renounced hopelessness. "Do you have any idea as to how we could leave this dungeon? I don't suppose there's a way we could escape without having to kill that…thing," Eros muttered, knowing of only one way to leave such a low-ranking realm, that being the consummate unmitigated genocide of all that lay within.
"I…don't. Originally I thought that if I waited long enough, a portal would open up again. However, although I know my perception of time has been warped courtesy of my ability, I think a few days have already passed, and yet, nothing, no portal, no troll, no change in scenery spare for the dying fulguration of an ashen wasteland," Fiamma commented, her ruby-red eyes momentarily shifting the object upon which they focused to the smouldering land of corpses that withered ardently in the backdrop, their cries an amorous popping their stench a sultry scent of heated sap. Yet, Eros paid little attention to the serene sight of the formerly sovereign, her domineering atmosphere replaced by placid longing. Whether it be for death or abstract escape, the boy cared not. His mind had shattered, thoughtless, and instinctual, his hands raised to his throat, that which once felt coarse through the assumed extravasate of vomit and smoke, now took on new meaning.
Days.
The youth had been comatose for such an extensive time, his brain solely active in its machinations of vehement hate, forcing a plague of heart-wrenching ordeals upon its sole possessor. Nightmares of Lovecraftian make beguiling falsehoods that could be mistaken for a skewed actuality. Still, it wasn't the inner workings of his brain that left Eros dazed and unmoving but rather the inordinate unmeasurable and unrestrained pain that cauterised his throat. No saliva coated his oesophagus, nor did a lone strand pool on the precipice of his tongue. His mind felt aloof, distant, as though conjoined to his body by little more than an illusory thread. His skin appeared tensed, profoundly coiled around his flesh as though trying albeit in a vain attempt to divorce itself from the muscles that loomed unfed underneath.
An all-consuming impassioned headache resonated amidst the boy's mind, destroying whatever reason he may have formerly grasped. Eros was dehydrated, sustained solely by the exiguous amounts of scarlet sweat that perspired tantalisingly upon the meridian of his tongue. He knew Fiamma had no clue as to the number of days passed, though judging by his current condition, the boy assumed it to be three, the fatal amount for a normal human, though one shy of the limit for an F-rank esper. His eyes were without gleam, hollow and lustreless, while a low groan exuded infinitely from his stomach. He needed sustenance, though as to how he would acquire it, the boy knew not.
"I…need water," Eros gasped, his mind only now accommodating for the perverted amounts of sadistic suffering that wracked his form. Immediately Fiamma's gems of ruby would return upon the shivering youth's visage, hunched and gaunt Eros could do little more than tremble, paralysed and unmoving, the slightest amount of exertion without assistance a torturous act. Bags of black lined the underside of hollow brown eyes, his body fell flat upon the earth, embraced by the frigid stone as if such a resting position could save him from inevitable exhaustion. The girl rushed over to the boy, placing herself by his side as flecks of silken crimson fell upon stained scarlet skin. Her lips appeared to quiver for a second, for she knew, no matter how much the youth demanded, there would be no water to blight such infernal hell.
"There…isn't any." Fiamma evenly stated, her tone placid, neutered and serene, with no ill will to be identified, merely abundant intrigue and care. And yet, no matter how overindulgent a voice she spoke with, her words would fall upon little more than deaf ears. Static, an overwhelming sense of loss, droned perpetually within Eros's mind. He had heard her words, though he failed to extrapolate the meaning behind them. His brain had already sunk into a land of depraved thoughts profane in nature.
"What about the sap?" Eros tenuously questioned, ignorant or rather choosing to remain obtuse to the fact of the matter he had long since apprehended.
"If there was any, it would be poisonous," Fiamma responded, pitying the teen who appeared decrepit and feeble, his body malnourished and muscles insubstantial, a far cry from the visage she saw on that fateful day.
Still, questions that spewed from Eros's parched lips were little more than filler, for he had already ascertained the beverage he would have to consume and the liabilities conjoined to such risk. Crimson momentarily flashed in his mind, the sight of blood and decay, the putrid scent of iron that composed the very base shade of his tinted drapes. The running liquid that pooled endlessly upon the slanted ridge of his lips. He would have to go outside, leave the cave, though such a notion was already fated. They couldn't stay here. They had to kill, to claim the body of that horrific tyrant. Such a journey would merely be a means to an end, the sole hope of getting the boy into a shape where his martyrdom wouldn't be in vain.
Gazing upon the youth's eyes and, more particularly, the tongue of blanched pink that pressed upon the very ceiling of his mouth, all notions were communicated from the vile blasphemous, sacrilegious artifice Eros had in store to the forsaken nature of their journey, all was portrayed in such fleeting look. Hands of ivory that once sat idly wrapped around the desecrated, vitiated arms of Eros, pulling him from his position of Siberian warmth plastered upon the cave's foundation to a standing disposition, his legs spindly, shaking from neglect and maltreatment akin to a victim of abuse. His gaze was hollowed and blurred, tunnel-visioned upon the distant horizon of infernal defilement, where he would find his potion of carnal-contaminated blasphemy.
Unknowingly irregular capricious heartbeats began to resonate between the two, a disclosed warmth passing through the couple, though one not insufferable in nature, not a blazing fire, but a sombre, melancholy heat, that which could solely be created courtesy of human contact. Stains of red pressed upon Fiamma's cheeks. At the same time, Eros lacked the fluidity to do as such, possessing little more than a bleached shade of off-white.
Apprehensive steps, so delicate and chiffon that noise failed to erupt from their inadequate body, emerged from the cave, the visage of two figures intertwined in a disgraceful dance of cumbersome infelicitous steps, the former a male, gaunt and sunken while the latter a divine beauty bearing a head of silken crimson hair that fell gracefully upon the shrunken boys form. Hollow-brown gazed upon the horizon, the land which they meandered through. The flames had died in recent minutes, whether courtesy of Fiammas ability or lack of nourishment, Eros knew not. The land underfoot crunched, dry and splintered, with great chasms of earth akin to rapturous portals to the underworld. Once possessing a zoetic hue of brilliant brown, it lay ashen, lifeless. Stumps bearing no nutritional value cloaked in layers of bleached white scattered before the youths, no flames to be spotted upon their departed bodies. It was a hellscape, a calamitous land of ruinous tragedy, yet, he gazed nought upon the sea of distant flames but instead scoured the land in search of one thing, a lifeless object he would soon detect from the mortal periphery of his view. A body of black, encrusted and charred, akin to a mound of dirt, rested lifelessly before the couple. Guided by the boy's shaken steps, Fiamma led him, like a lamb, to the slaughter before the oddity, whose identity she reluctantly knew.
An abhorrent, vengeful, rancour scent plagued the land, stimulating the urge to vomit within all cursed by its phantasmal damnation, its figure amorphic, without definite curves nor outline, unsymmetrical and vague, little more than a seemingly miscellaneous hill of sunless ebony, Eros crouched, supported by the reluctant hands of Fiamma, his head eye-level with the avant-garde creation, his stomach lurched in anticipation, both prepared for the sudden stimuli and the repugnant urge that came with such satanic action. Trembling hands, frail, merely a silhouette of bone, wrapped around the corner of the assumed seared dirt, grasping it, yet, the sensation was not granulous, but the very antithesis, a feeling akin to leather, one of inadequate, frangible make.
'I suppose this will be the end of whatever relationship I have with Fiamma,' Eros inwardly jeered, a sense of antipathy blossoming from within a land of acid. He hated himself, and more particularly, he detested what he was bound to do, for with such monologue reverberated, a horrible, blood-curdling rent, a sound akin to pulled flesh, neigh, not akin, it was severed flesh, the skin of blackened colour stuck to Eros's palm, adhered in place by unexercised platelets, pink gunk with a strength that rivalled glue. A surreptitious clandestine world of crimson fell upon the view of the youth as, unconsciously, his mouth used what little amounts of liquid remained in his body to salivate. The inside of the beast was hollow, no intestines to be seen nor heart to palpate. All of it had melted, leaving little more than a pool of mixed bile in its place.
Eros's head lowered.
His eyes, the former hollow brown, now without the light of life, its chocolate shade devoid in such a hellish world.
The taste of Iron, the putrescent stomach-turning abandoned stench that solely emanates from that not-of-this-world, myriad flavours and emotions bubbled within the boy's absentminded brain, profane thoughts, hatred for what he had become, yet, they remained overpowered by his urge to live, to be of use until his final moments. Countless times did excrement leave the youth's mouth, and innumerable times did he redigest that which formerly pooled in the pits of his stomach.
The syrupy liquid coagulated, forming blockades amid his throat. It wanted him dead, vengeance for the unidentified corpse Eros now desecrated, yet he would merely digest it all, his throat torn despite the apparent coating of crimson. Like a pig, his head was never to leave the trowel.
Eros merely drank.
He consumed all until none remained, yet he dared not raise his face to allow the world to see his reprehensible physique. Eros wished to wallow in self-loathing, to hate that which he became. However, as though based on instinct, Eros needed to breathe, to surface from the realm of crimson, which only he knew.
His bountiful head of untamed hair stuck tightly to his skin, dyed in the unrighteous, wicked shade of crimson that coated his form, skin of sickly hue now painted scarlet, dripping from his lips still wet with the bile to every pore of his face, it felt warm, though not serene, the heat was satanic, reprobate and ungodly, it clung tightly to his form, weighing his flesh down as though attempting to condemn him. Eros's eyes remained lifeless, utterly hollow, exuding an air of sombre macabre as though that of a corpse. The stench of death raped his body, impregnating every inch of skin the boy possessed. He felt faint, anaemic from all the regurgitation he spilt, yet he was the very antithesis to such illness. He didn't wish to turn, to face Fiamma, nor gaze upon her body with his ability. He was disgusting, a being abandoned by all. Eros's eyes remained distant, his focus upon the scorching skyline, its tongues of infinite orange now little more than faint specks in the distance.
The once bountiful shrubbery now little more than a carcass of ash.
And that was when he saw it.
Movement.