Dragon_Jak
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Burn Wounds (Short story)
🕑 Added 2020-06-30 02:46:32 +0000 UTCA monster lay in the jungle. It did not know how long it had been there for. Perhaps it had laid dormant for millions of years with moss and vines snaking up its body. Perhaps it had simply appeared in that space. One moment elsewhere, and now here. Whatever its origin, the monster began to move, standing up from its curled position.
The creature’s shadow stretched from the center of the clearing to the very edge as it stood. Its head was eye level to the nearby branches monkeys would often climb along. Blue scales shifted across its body, like silken chainmail made from the night sky. Claws curved into metallic palms, clicking as they stretched and swished through tropical air. It yawned, and within the stretching sinew was a sea of teeth. As many as stars in the night sky, overlapping and whirring off of each other as a tongue made of fire snaked between them, tasting the air.
It found the taste putrid.
Heat. Unbearable, intolerable heat. In its moment of awareness, of hereness, all it felt was the boiling of its scales. Waves of heat buffeted its chest, pushing it from the outside and filling it from within. It tasted like fire to an already burning tongue. The creature could not think. It tried to move, and felt its body become slick. The creature had never known sweat until now. Its body heaved, bringing a claw up to try and wipe this slickness away. But even as it swiped a finger across its brow, a new bead of sweat replaced the last.
The creature shook itself like a dog, letting the grass around it take up the slickness. Yet still, as soon as it left, more was created. Every crack between its scales felt like a tiny pinprick of salty wetness, cloying the creature together.
The creature bellowed, biting at the air with its mouth made of saw blades with the goal of eviscerating the heat. As with the sweat, the moment the creature defeated the air, more rushed in to take its place. The monster bellowed and raged, its claws whirling through the air so fast that the wind sparked against it. But even still, the heat wouldn’t leave.
The creature began to turn downwards. Its feet slammed into the moist jungle dirt, causing it to ripple and fly away from its foot. It stomped again, catching the grass now in its errant stomping. Its hands began to rake furrows into the ground, sending flowers and weeds alike flying into the air. Their dirt covered roots, still glistening from last night’s rainfall, slapped against the enormous trees surrounding this clearing. The creature continued to slash and maul, tearing the grassy opening into an ugly circle of upturned dirt, its mouth held in a snarl all the while.
The grass became angry with the creature. This monster made of the night sky was hurting it after all. Whatever its reasons for doing so didn’t matter. It spoke in hushed whispers. It spoke to the vines of the forest. It spoke to the stinging plants. It spoke to the trees, and the flowers, and even the ugliest of weeds. They all agreed that something would have to be done.
The creature screamed, throwing piles and piles of dirt to either side, as if searching for something under it all, when a blade of grass landed on its back. The little grass stem weaved its way between the scales of the beast, and jabbed it. The beast howled once more, becoming a flurry of motion as it tried to find the source of the pain. In its fury, the grass blade was ripped to pieces, as all the others had been.
From the jungle came ropes of the thickest vine, sturdy and powerful. They encircled the monster, binding its arms to its body. The creature’s tail swung around, snapping the vines just like the grass. Stinging flowers launched into the clearing. They pumped their strange poisons into the creature. Some wished to make it hallucinate, perhaps that it might leave. Others wanted to paralyse the monster, bringing the carnage to a stop. Others still had death in mind. None succeeded. The claws weaved through the flowers, until they were petals in the dirt.
It was now that the animals began to arrive. The grass had warned them, told them of the force lurking in the clearing. The plant eaters came first. They knew predators well. They would run, and the monster would chase them. Birds began to dive the creature, one at a time, pelting it with scratches and dropped stones. As the fourth bird began to dive, the creature moved like lightning. It leapt into the air. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five meters, until its eyes, the colour of sickly yellow flesh, were inches from the macaw’s own. The bird had no time to move, no time, even, to think. It died, torn apart by the claws.
The creature hung in the air for longer than it should’ve, turning the sky into a swirl of feathers and blood. When it landed, its legs sinking into the earth, its night-sky skin was speckled with red stars.
It was then that the trees could watch no more. They watched this carnage from the start. They would not let others die. Those around the monster began to creak. Loud and long, they let their roots come away from the dirt, allowing their full weight to crash down onto the beast. The monkeys, looking onwards, yelled a cheer. A cheer that died in their throats.
The first tree was little more than sawdust a second after hitting the ground, and the second quickly followed. The ripping of bark, shredding of leaves, the clicking of thousands of metallic movements, all of it rung out, deafening the forest. But even as the fifth and final offending tree was reduced to nothing, the creature was not done. The heat still had its wrapped wet, boiling fingers around the monster. It began to move, picking a direction only because that’s where it was already going.
The sky burned the creature, even as it filled the air with blood and clippings. Animals and plants fell to it in equal measure. A trail of upturned dirt fertilized in crushed bones stretched behind it, growing longer and longer as the sun rose high into the sky. When the monster was panting, its arms burning from the haze of heat and work, it reached the end of the forest.
It found houses here. Simple places, made of stone. From these houses came men and women, screaming as they saw the creature, once the colour of the ocean depths, now covered in reds, greens, and browns. Many ran from this beast, but some stayed. They threw punches at the monster, their fists impacting its hide, their knuckles shattering against its iron scales, and their cries torn from their throats as the beast retaliated. Others saw their brothers and sisters ripped apart, fetching at first spears and swords to fight the monster. These were turned on their owners as the creature continued the rampage.
The humans were no sooner going to give up than the monster was. Humans with guns arrived, pelting the creature with bullet after bullet. This animal felt the pain, but the ammunition simply fell to its feet. More guns, heavier, bigger, mounted to helicopters and tanks, all of it came. The creature never tired, was never so much as scratched, even as the blood on its skin was blasted away by the hail of gunfire. Its scales shone as explosions rippled around its claws, but the sweat never evaporated for long.
And then the humans retreated. The monster’s ears twitched, but it heard nothing. No screams, no pleading for life, no gunfire. Still, it boiled. The creature bellowed a call. Not of victory, but of a battle that was still not over. It echoed through the dead landscape. The houses, no more than rubble. The trees, burned down to the roots. The people, impossible to distinguish from the next red splatter.
The air, whistling.
The monster looked up as a huge mechanical contraption fell from the sky. In turn, the creature jumped, ready to meet the new threat. Its claws tried to tear at it, but it had already exploded.
A thermonuclear bomb exploded forty-five meters above the ground of a small village in Peru. The shockwave was heard in Florida, several hundred kilometers away, and the blast could be seen from central Brazil. The creature was engulfed in an explosion no living animal on earth had ever survived. The fire, the heat, beyond anything it had experienced that day. Fire engulfed its still open eyes, and it roared in pain as the pressure, the radiation, the heat, became a fixture of every inch of its body. Its scales pressed in like buttons on a telephone, pushing into the skin beneath like the explosion was calling someone, anyone, to kill the creature housed within. The fire of its tongue was passionately kissed by the explosion, the many flames invading the monster’s mouth, seeking to crush the wind from its giant lungs. The radiation, in an instant, set to work picking apart the creature. Its fingers dug into the genes, the molecules, the very atoms, trying to pull them apart. To rearrange them like it was supposed to do.
After three minutes, the explosion stopped. What was once destroyed became desolate. There had been signs that houses had been built, that trees had stood, and that people had lived. But the bomb took care of all of that. Except for it.
The monster stayed, its lungs still not filling with oxygen as it continued to scream. When the pain finally subsided, three and a half hours later, the creature inhaled and began to walk. The sky had filled with ash and debris, covering the sunlight that threatened to poke through the unnatural clouds. Even like this, it was hot. The creature knew true heat now, true fire, but the air tasted no less putrid.
In walking, the creature found something. The only thing left to find in this place anymore. A cave opening. It was pitch black inside, and so big that even the creature could fit. As the monster crawled in, deeper and deeper into the cave, it felt the heat fall away from it. The darkness swirled around the creature, wrapping it in a limbless hug. The sweat of the beast fell away from its scales and was not replaced. When the monster walked even lower, it found torches. A huge natural room within the cave, with three torches dotting the walls. They were a soothing, orange colour. Not blinding white. The creature watched them flicker, feeling no warmth from them.
A woman stepped forward into the torchlight. Another of the humans who had tormented the monster so. She wore armour, copper coloured and shining despite the depths of the cave. The sword that sat at her side did not leave its scabbard as she faced the monster. She instead simply gazed at the creature. The beast, still covered in the ash of the desolate lands outside, tensed its muscles again, preparing to rip through this as it had all other comers.
The woman stepped forward, the monster's eyes flickering as she began to grow. At first, standing as tall as the humans it had seen. Then, she was twice that size, her eyes perfectly level with the monster’s own as she got closer. She wrapped her arms around the creature, drawing it in. Her arms, far smaller than the monsters even at this size, hid strength as she pulled the beast closer. She hugged the monster, the ash never once staining her armour. The creature froze, preparing for some trick, but that trick never came. Her arms, her embrace, it felt crisp and cold. Like a quiet winter morning before the sun had risen. Its muscles unspooled against her, and she felt something new trickle onto her shoulder. She continued to hug the monster as it wept.
