He is five when he breaks his leg, as he follows his outcast clan across the desert.
Crying and begging for help, he crawls onward. He chokes on sand, tears running down his face, carving and crawling through the sand towards the crest of the dune. The trucks of the caravan slowly vanish into the hot dunes and light.
"Wait, I can keep up! I won't be a burden! Mother!" A sickening wave of terror engulfs him, devours him, and he feels Something move in his body.
Then there is blinding light, spine-ripping pain as skin tears, and then the light burns within. He towers above the caravan, the dunes, a hundred feet of and pale scales, breath horrible beyond words. Women faint, dogs howl, men vomit. The stench of ozone and rot is heavy enough to taste, toxic and foul. He reels, and takes a step. His foot plunges deep into the ground, blasting a crater in the sands. His face is a naked human skull, ragged and wild hair falling into his eyes, and jagged ribs erupt from his skin.
He stumbles towards the caravan, trying to speak through a skull's lipless jaws.
'I can keep up,'
When he collapses from exhaustion, he crushes five trucks beneath his weight. The fuel and ammunition within them explode, scattering burning fuel and shards of metal through the convoy.
Dozens die, or suffer scars that will remain for their entire lives. Before long, his new form rots and smokes down to his old form, pale skin crackling like bacon and then restored to smooth perfection.
***
"Do it again," Father demands.
He waits for a moment that never comes. Then he turns to his Father, and wordlessly pleads for help.
"Goddamnit," Father says, a half-empty bottle in hand.
"Maybe he cannot do it again," Father's important friend says.
"He will do it again," his Father snarls.
He stands there, unchanging.
"Damn it," Father says, and then he whirls his arm around. The amber bottle catches the light for an instant.
Stabbing pain breaks through his head, and the shock brings the transformation. His power swirls and cracks like whips of black fire and thunder, burning him from within and making the earth split beneath his might. Father is lucky to escape the blast unscathed. He reels on his colossal feet once again, jagged ribs clattering like pottery.
"Do not fall!" Father shouts. Father's friend looks at him with something approaching sympathy.
As the weeks go by, he learns to walk all over again. He masters the trick, but it's always easier to go on all fours.
[+++]
He is six when he first sees combat. Father and his friends talk about a great work, an empire of their own. A united people, like before the Rains came.
"Destroy them," Father orders, pointing to the defiant city. It is a holdover from before the Black Rains, all glass and steel and concrete. He transforms again, agony flaying him from within as he towers above all else.
He complies with his Father's wishes.
His clawed hands rip open ancient buildings, slash tanks apart, and splatter red across the cracked streets. Trucks and motorbikes race through the burning ruins, only to be snapped in half by his jaws or smashed open by emaciated hands. Gunfire and artillery glances harmlessly off of hardened armor, barely inconveniencing him. When he crushes the crowds beneath skeletal feet, he remembers crushing ants as a child
He doesn't think he's a child anymore.
[+++]
He is seven when he is ordered to execute the leaders of an enemy nation. He does as ordered, pulping them in his clawed hands. When he turns back into a human, flesh blackened and smoking from the strain, his hands are still bloody. So is the rest of him.
It is Father's friend who has him sent to the infirmary to rest. The white sheets turn black and smoke where his bare flesh touches them, and in places dark veins writhe from his skin before it reforms. When the skin returns there are feathery patterns etched into it. Those eventually fade as well.
Even long after the gore is washed off, he can taste it on his tongue.
[+++]
He is eight when the enemy fortress is under siege. With his power, Father says, the gates will fall easily.
When he charges, a round of explosives manages to draw blood. One eye explodes, one arm breaks. The fortress falls, all right. But so does his blood, smoking black and foul. When he turns back, his arm hangs limp. It hurts.
But his flesh smokes and blackens, dark veins reforming the eye and arm until they are intact once more. Father looks disappointed in him.
He vows to do better.
[+++]
He is nine when he begins to work alone. With his speed, he can outrun anything on land, and his height gives him all the sight he needs. Enemy armies encounter shattered bridges, lose scouts and motorbikes, and suffer night attacks when they make camp. He slashes through hundreds, thousands, crushed and broken beneath his assaults.
He soon fells an army.
Father is pleased.
[+++]
He is ten when he first encounters phosphorus explosives. The pain is immense, searing away layers of bony armoring. He screams, a noise like a child in pain, yet magnified to unimaginable volume. Men clutch their bleeding ears even as he rips off his own skin for relief.
When he flees the battle and crashes into a river, Father chastises him.
"Never run from a fight, monster," he says. "Do your duty."
'I'm sorry, Father. I'll do better, Father', he expresses with his body language, the only language he speaks now.
"Stop looking like a kicked dog," Father says. "Kill them now."
[+++]
He is eleven when the war slows down. For a time, all is calm. He has the opportunity to see Father's friend's children.
The girl, Emma, is too young to understand. She screams at half-healed wounds incurred from phosphorus, wounds he has yet to heal after the most recent battle. When he looks in the mirror, he can see his ugly black veins crawling through the burns. They look like the maggots that infest the bodies of the dead. The enemies know phosphorus hurts, but he is growing used to it.
He thinks he understands why she screamed.
He is a monster.
On the other hand the son, Cleo, finds his scars fascinating. He asks to see them and is amazed when the black veins regenerate the flesh. When Cleo asks, he lets him touch the healed cheek to see that it is truly repaired. Cleo smiles and laughs, and he wonders if he should as well.
***
He wishes he could see Cleo again, but it is not to be. He has to train and carry boxes of ammunition and medicine. With his speed he can bring supplies far quicker than any truck or motorbike could hope to do. Before long, his Father's great work is interlocked. The empire he and his friends created grows larger.
It is good work.
[+++]
He is twelve when he is called back to war.
Another city crushed, hundreds jellied beneath his feet. Hurled ammunition and rubble cut through men and women, explosions casting cloaks of smoke over the fallen. He vomits after wading through the rubble to finish off the survivors, a gout of boiling black exploding from his skeletal maw.
[+++]
He is thirteen when a rebellion is stamped out, crushing the leader in his jaws. It tastes of gore and iron, foul on his tongue. He spits out the corpse.
The family of the rebel leader is hanged.
Afterward, Father takes him to a drinking house. It is dark and smelly, and too loud. He remembers crushing tanks, the sounds of metal tearing and ammunition exploding. When some man wins at a game and good-natured screaming ensues, he remembers the screams of the men he squeezed to death.
"You have done good work," Father says.
Father tries to offer him a foul-smelling drink. He doesn't accept it, and Father merely shrugs before drinking it himself.
He wonders why he had to kill all those men.
[+++]
He is fourteen when rebels take him captive, a hostage. Without orders, he does not bother to transform.
The rebels spit on him, mock him, howl curses and demand explanations.
"Why did you kill my family?"
"Why did you eat my father?"
"Why do you serve a tyrant?"
He does not react, and after hours of screamed questions and demands, the rebels begin to wonder if they made a mistake. He barely hears their arguments and shouts.
When his Father finds their lair, he has them all slaughtered in a burst of gunfire.
***
Later, when he walks through the city alone, a girl stops him.
"You're that monster, right?" she asks. He nods.
"You're kind of cute," she says, brushing a strand of pale hair behind his ear. He slaps her hand away and runs off.
[+++]
He is fifteen when all war ends.
Finally, finally, he rests.
Father's friend, the very important man, takes him into his home for a time. Father is gone to meet with some important people, people who know medicine. Father also takes severed fingers from him, so easily healed, and so easily stored in jars. He heard that Father wants to make more like him, and he wonders if they would like him or not. Would they understand him? Would they fight him? He knows cats fight each other, and people too. The son, Cleo, is there. He is kind to him and offers to teach him to read. He agrees, voicelessly.
Cleo is a kind person. Despite everything he has done, Cleo only sees him as a person. As a human being. When a window is broken and he raises his fists to destroy, it is Cleo who soothes him and says calm words. When his sister asks why he will not speak, it is Cleo who leaps to his defense. When a thunderstorm sweeps the city, sounds and lights bringing the war and violence back to the fore, it is Cleo who holds one hand until the noise and terror pass.
"You need a proper name," Cleo says. They read old books, things like the Bible, Shakespeare and the IlIad. In them, they find Achilles.
Archie, Cleo calls him. It is a good name. And it is something he chose, something his father didn't give him. Archie smiles for the first time in years.
"You don't have to be a monster," Cleo says one day, when the memories come flooding through his mind and Archie wants nothing more than to break and kill.
He turns that over in his head, again and again, looking for a point. But it's smooth and heavy as a stone, resting somewhere dark inside himself.
"You don't have to be a monster."
"You don't have to be a monster."
"You don't have to be a monster."
"You don't have to be a monster."
What does that mean? It's as incomprehensible as the way birds fly.
He is a monster, isn't he?
***
Weeks later, Father attempts to dispose of Cleo's father to seize full control of the Empire he made. He demands of Archie: "kill them all…"
Archie picks up his Father. He is not careful, and Father's legs and hip are shattered. As Father screams and spits curses, Archie glares at him. Father has done nothing useful. It is Archie who crushed armies. It is Archie who built Father's legacy. It is Archie who slaved for years, Archie who smashed men and women and children, Archie who burned and bled and broke…
"You fucker, I always hated your pretty face. Monster."
Before he knows what he's doing, Archie pulps Father between his teeth, spraying red and bone.
There is a long silence. And then screams from the onlookers fill his hearing. Archie's cold blue eyes, shattered and wild, focus on each and every person present. Father's friend, his daughter Emma, four terrified guards and thirty shouting soldiers… His bony jaws, stained and soaked with gore, pant white steam. He sees Cleo, eyes wide with horror, and something breaks in his mind.
And then he runs across the desert, full of shame and horror and fear.
Cleo commandeers a motorbike, and follows.