A brumal frore of liquidised ice, an atmosphere of boreal make, a blanket of frost, despite the youth's still shut eyes, such tactility pressed upon his senses. His skin felt sodden, submerged in and asphyxiated by dank garments, like a second layer of skin. They clung to his body as though hoping to drain what little torridity the boy possessed from his form, leaving him little more than a shrivelled, frost-bitten and blackened husk. His mind appeared termagant, a chaotic tempest of thoughts, unable to differentiate between the gelid existence of the present and the chimeric nightmare of a phantasmic past.
'A dream…' Eros inwardly commented, his lips breaking out into an inconspicuous, muted tremble, though not one forged by his Siberian blanket of unknown make, but instead the abhorrent anathema of a dream his mind conjured. 'That same dream…when, when will it stop? I hate it, I hate it, I hate it,' he continued, his visage unknowingly contorted, portraying a mockery of a vaporous foetus. The world remained dark to the boy, a belie land he dared not wish to apprehend, and yet, he would be forced to partake in such a cruel act, for although his eyes remained shut, concealed by a curtain of diaphanous flesh, he couldn't obscure his remaining senses.
The land beneath Eros pressed upon his head with its hyperboreal body, its physique bloodless, impassible and concrete, lacking the zoetic atmosphere that radiated from the quondam realm of green. This wasn't earth, not a land of soil. It couldn't be. Eros knew as such. Its body was too calloused, adamant and brusque, a far cry from Gaia's soft, congenial visage. Unconsciously the fabric that held shut his eyes loosened, giving way to a deadened luminosity, one so ethereal it possessed no tint to its form.
Drab, a monochrome world of lustreless grey, cheerless and unchanging. Such reality presented itself before the boy, its macabre background, its sole point of boast, fractured, fragmented and mutilated by innumerable ruination, with chasms of darkness that seeped into the concrete flooring. Eros had no questions as to where he was, only about how he got there. A cave, a cavity in the earth. Bearing a clandestine body of ashen dusk, Eros pressed against the cantankerous substance until his eyes levelled, and his stomach lurched into a pointed ninety-degree angle.
The realm the boy's gaze rested upon had shifted, no longer a world of homogenous rock. Flecks of ebony penumbra lined the cavernous expansive walls, shading them, painting them in a dreary unearthly manner. Their bodies were non-euclidian, curvaceous like a warped mirror. Fragments of rock hung listlessly atop the boy's stare, pointed and sharp. They reprehensibly teased a painless, instantaneous death. No water dripped from their precipice, nor did there appear to be any crystallisation of the liquid upon the walls. It was odd, uncanny, eerie.
And that was when Eros noticed it, fastidiously scintillating from the extremities of his chocolate-brown eyes stained a muddled hollow hue with worry, a blazing orange, and the overbearing heat that came with such polychromasia. The Siberian frost the boy believed to plague his form was little more than an illusion, a fragmented reality of which he chose to postulate, the sodden dampness accredited to his paralysing fear formed instead by the indomitable incalescence of the woman-made second sun.
A horizon of incandescence, a sea of flames, bearing no end nor concept of death, it consumed all, warping space, giving carcass to air, its mere existence creator of myriad miracles, none of which venerable nor seraphic. Eros's lungs cowered at the sight, engraved and damned by such unhallowed tongues of orange, they rasped, demanding the breath the boy had forgotten.
*Gagh, cough, cough* Eros wheezed, his form floundering, teetering on the verge of collapse. His head felt hot, turbid in its anarchistic desire for self-destruction. Charred flesh sizzled amidst the boy's oesophagus, now blackened with neither mucous membrane nor water to act as a paladin to combat the infernal miasma that ravaged his stomach. A caliginous effluvium ruptured from the boy's throat, spreading forth amidst the tainted air that swirled amidst the presence of the youth, poisoning that which was once hallowed, adored by the earth and universe as a whole, smoke pooled in the pits of the boy's eyes, branding them with a bloodied hue. Eros would remain this way, vomiting up and atoning for his feeble decision to live for what appeared to be hours but, in truth, was little longer than minutes.
"You're awake?" A dispassionate quiescent cry of matriarchal origin reverberated amidst the polluted heavens of the cave, her location unknown to the gagging youth who could do little more than sporadically shift his bloodshot eyes in a vain attempt to uncover the placement of the assumed crimson-haired beauty. A feat he scantily managed to accomplish, for from the very terminus of his gaze, he saw her, illuminated by a torrid world, unaffected and unconcerned by the apocalyptic remnants of a once vivacious land of emerald, her crimson hair embraced by the sunless exhalation, intertwined with layers of soot. At the same time, her clothes appeared unscathed, unbloodied, maidenly and unadulterated. Ruby red glimmered, bathed in a pantomime of orange, its sight set upon the ghastly form of a nauseated teen.
Fiamma stood there at the precipice of death, where two realms collided: a heavenly sanctuary and the inevitable hell that lay in wait. Her figure impassioned, conflagrant, seemingly unperturbed by the atrocities that occupied every inch of her peer's mind, and yet, Eros could see her shake. Her outline vibrated. At the same time, her lips remained clasped in a desperate attempt to restrain a shriek, streaks of branded red fell from her eyes.
"Yes," Eros coughed, not having the heart to point out his companion's chinked armour of apocryphal dauntlessness. "Where am I? I know we're in a cave, but…how far are we from that…from that thing, that calamity wearing the erroneous mask of a troll." He continued, his eyes quivering at the mere mention of such scourge. His words, however, would be instantly met with nought but a shared shudder followed by a momentary droll of placid serenity.
"I don't know. After you collapsed, I just walked and walked, shielded by the flames, until I saw this cavity. It felt like hours, though the distance I travelled was likely a lot less due to having to pull you along," Fiamma monologued, her mind only just piecing together such crucial enlightenment that, despite her passively enhanced capabilities courtesy of being a high-ranking esper it still took her additional time to carry the comatose boy.
"I see. Did that…thing follow after you once I collapsed? Does it know where we are?" Eros murmured, his mind replaying the scene of instantaneous death and decay on repeat, dyeing his thoughts in the memento mori of the crimson world.
"I don't know. My ears were filled solely with the crackling of wood and the sizzling of sap, though I assume not, the earth didn't shake enough, nor did I hear the imminent collapse of distant woodland." Fiamma responded, confident in her assumptions, that, at the very least, the creature bearing the fictitious title of troll was obscured as to their current whereabouts.
"I see, thank you," Eros gratefully commented, his mind a tempestuous furore of chaotically contrived rumination, thoughts the antithesis of hopeful or joyous. He had no idea as to how much time had passed, how long he had remained unconscious, nor if the beast had taken action in such period, and judging by the infinite circumference of orange-skewed flames, neither did Fiamma, the day was eternal, never-ending for the empyrean canvass above remained despoiled by the perverted hue of the conflagrated vignette.
It was in the midst of such profane, depraved thoughts that Eros heard it, a voice so subtle, reticent and muted one could mistake it for but a passing zephyr.
"Fiamma, my name's Fiamma."
Fiamma had blessed the boy with her name, a feat Eros seemingly understood little about. He had always possessed the ability to know, allowed the privilege to be obtuse and dense to such a monumental accomplishment exalted by the repressed. She saw him as an equal, someone of even standings. The sharing of names placed him within her sights.
The girl, no, Fiamma spoke, unaware as to the youth's ability nor the fact he was already privy to such seemingly vital information, yet, along with such a statement came another message visible atop a translucent parchment of unknown make.
{+10% Affection}
Instinctually, Eros's left eye flashed in its odd pink light, bringing up the girl's status courtesy of his "Partial analysis".
{Name: Fiamma Adeen}
{Age: 17}
{Race: Human}
{Ability: Pyrokinesis}
{Love: 59%}
59%, her love for the boy rested at such seemingly low number, and yet, to Eros, it was the highest it had ever been, a precipice he knew not of, still, he felt not satisfaction, but rather inward loathing and self-pitying foreboding, for he knew, neigh, prophesied the eventual decline, like every soul of the opposite sex the boy had invariably contacted she would end up misanthropic to the bearer of the title Eros.
"Thank you, Fiamma." Eros skittishly commented, the unknown light in his left eye dying, restored to its initial state of being.
However, it appeared his conversation had yet to die, for from the centre of his gaze, he saw Fiamma's beady eyes, her twin jewels sparkling in perceivably transparent expectancy. She wished to apprehend something, a trait pressed upon the youth's bloodied form, the name of her saviour, whether it be out of pity or unperceived, undistinguished and foreign longing.
"My name's Eros," The boy stated, forcing a gentle rend upon his bloodied lips as the cave fell silent.
Fiamma's eyes widened in awe.