《Ways of Extinction》 (0) THE FEAST OF CIPHER (0) In winter, life itself is punishment for the impoverished. There is little hope to be found in the slums of Novant. Crippled soldiers lay wasted in alleyways, drunk out of their minds. Street urchins run amok in rags, fighting with stray dogs for scraps. The truly destitute close their eyes to the world, helpless. The snow kills them all quickly. Families starve in humble shanties. They curl up by the fire, dry and warm and hungry. Theirs is a gradual end. Amidst this monotonous tragedy, Leah knows she is going to die soon. Like her older brother. She can feel it in her empty gut. For as long as she could remember, her stomach has rattled uselessly in her, demanding things it can''t have. As a baby, she had all the milk she could dream of. She cannot fully remember it, when she was like that, but imagining it is better. That, at least, makes Leah feel a little warm inside. She isn''t of much use to the family. Leah wishes she was. But she isn''t worth much, really. Nothing but a tiny little thing despite lasting twelve summers. Worst of all, Leah is a girl. Her mama never forgave her for that. Papa always said, before he left because of her, that mama didn''t love her enough to kill her. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. She''s always felt there was something wrong with that, somehow. Calling it love. But Leah''s always been too hungry to think much. Leah shakily rolls onto her side and with trembling hands retrieves the last of her wheat crust. It used to be her brother''s share. She tastes it carefully, piously, eating it with slow fervor. Her stomach rolls with disgust¡ªwhat once wasn''t enough now feels like too much. She feels heavy instead of nauseously light as she swallows. Leah blinks in confusion. Her heart hurts, somehow. Obvious even through hunger. "Mama? Mama... I feel funny..." Leah whispers. "Leah? You little bitch, talk to me... Don''t fall asleep¡ªLeah? Leah!" Mama shrieked. Leah couldn''t understand her to the end. Maybe she''s too dumb. She hopes mama can forgive her that, if not the rest. A hazy dream beckons, and suddenly, even the sharp pains of her stomach fade away. Is she dying? She can''t tell. Surely, people wouldn''t be scared of it, if it were such a pleasant thing. The hunger that has chased her ever since she could remember is no more. She falls deeper into oblivion and knows its name is death. Perhaps it was love after all. Leah has never been loved. She has never been loved, so maybe that''s why she wakes up. (1) THE LOTUS LIES IN MUD (1) It is a new moon and the forest is quiet. Hordes of droning crickets reduced to silence, wildlife frozen, the minks and the vonkish and the tam-tams turned still as cold ash. The wind whistles through the undergrowth yet there is no sound. Inside the forest''s darkness, twisted and decaying under intertwined knots of the tree canopies, life waits in taunt agitation. Slowly, hazy twilight spills into the night air and lingers amongst the stars, the first light before dawn. Under the sky, shadows only grow darker. Five miles east lies the city of Novant, the furthest of all frontiers and a bubbling capital of failed ambitions. Seeking veins of gold and the whispers of the mystic, the mundane settlers of old created a ''city'' in three days. They were the most ambitious of their fellows, greedy for the heart of magic and wealth. All of them died harrowing deaths. In time, the descendants of the founders will become one with the forest. Or so the story goes. Brighter legends say they sacrificed themselves to quell the forest''s wrath, leaving the city intact for those who remain. Others say that magic is nothing more than an old wives tale¡ªthat the forest is nothing but a forest. The tough folk of Novant have always laughed in the face of danger. Together, tonight, joined by many pints of beer, they rejoice in their ignorance. Dawn rises and the shadows change. In the heart of one such shadow, a spirit is born. Leah feels herself come back in slow waves. Like a phantom itch, like marble sculpted into a statue, she is everything and then¡ªshe is Leah again. She is ''alive'' again. If she can be described by mere words from the human language anymore, that is. The sudden intrusive thought brings Leah to a halt. < Am I a monster? > Leah heard the ancient people of the southern square talk about it before. No one ever turned into monsters, even in their stories, but... The demonic Skiva and the unfeeling Elriga''u''na were always horrific villains. The Qheenir were the origin of plague; the Abat were false apostles and heretics; the Seosmon were a bunch of filthy turncoats that revolted against the human race''s sovereignty. All of them were of a different species. And Leah wasn''t human anymore, was she? < I wanna go home... > She didn''t want to be a monster. When she was human, mama hated her strong nose, freckled cheeks, the bony parts of her wrists and the size of her ears, everything that was ''hers''. She hated everything that wasn''t from papa. There was nothing left of papa now. Leah was scared. Did that mean mama wouldn''t even hate her now? Would she not care? Leah found that to be the worst part of it all. Death was fine, Leah was okay with it. At least it got rid of her hunger. She didn''t expect anything more from anyone. Leah gave up on love and school and sweets, so she could give up on this too. She didn''t want to hurt anyone. She didn''t want mama to know. If mama ever knew, Leah would kill her. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. Suddenly disgusted, Leah jerks her translucent and incomplete body against the shadow, yet she remains stuck inside of it. Something inside of her bursts in irritation, so she gathers and shoves all of ''Leah'' against the shadow. Foreign instincts scream in alarm, but it is already too late. The shadow has cracked. Whirling tendrils of darkness rise and fall, twisting with the wind, dangling and threadbare. The sun high above reaches out and the shadow turns pale. Soon, there is no shadow left. Leah is free for a brief, stunning moment. And then she is not. The sun, the wind, the earth, the sky and the clouds twist and reveal themselves, pulsing as the world is stripped of false perception. Color fades, sound fades, the cradle of sanity falls into the sea of chaos¡ªand all is lost. Wavelengths weave through everything, collapsing into particles and eventualities, colliding and dissipating with matter and mass. Energy shifts between potential and kinetic, heat and mechanical, conserving and immortal in the cycle. Smaller lies the micro: the positive proton, the neutral neutron, the negative electron, orbiting and comprising everything¡ªgyrating in countless tiny worlds that never touch. Beyond, in macro, lies gravity and the electromagnetic, the strong attractive force and the weak radioactive decay. Everything is bound by what kills it. Order is the beginning. As time follows space, as atoms spin, the closed system loses the sovereign''s benediction. Disorder reigns, entropy its kingmaker. The core has always been madness. The forest eats itself and lives forever. < The forest eats itself and... > The nameless entity unknowingly repeats. Their perception has unraveled, leaving the world raw and untamed. Mortals can''t change the world--only see it differently. Truth is forever. Gods remain. Even amidst the cosmos, such beings are difficult to ignore and harder to understand. Yet, as always, they are irresistible. Grand Asvarki is lost to king and sovereign, distant kin to flora and fauna. Violence for violence is the rule of beasts; death for life is the law of the forest. All else is impermanence. < ...lives forever. > The nameless entity feels breathtaking hunger, deeper than anything she has ever known yet familiar to the taste. Like all hunger, it is all-consuming and she is starved. She knows this, knows it better than she knows herself. ''Hunger'' and ''Leah'' are inseparable. So Leah must exist. Leah the girl, the spirit, the collapsing wavelength and the false conservation, are one in the same. The hourglass flips and all aspects of Leah flood back in, coalescing into a single whole. Information is retrieved and stuffed back in a disarray of concepts, while the dissociated core regains stability. Leah''s translucent and torn spirit regenerates. All the while, hunger sings in her soul and drowns out the rest of the world. It is her anchor. Yet the situation remains dire. If Leah waits too long, she will fall deeper into the untamed world. Hunger is powerful because it is impossible to ignore. It is a remnant of morality¡ªof Newtonian human perception and no, stop¡ªthat shouldn''t exist for current Leah. It grounds her enough to retain a semblance of self. But as long as she can see, there is no safety. The problem is that sight might as well be a euphemism for a spirit. Rather than eyes, spirits have the nigh omnipresent sensory field of the soul. There is no brain to dilute the world into something comprehensible. It is not impossible to shut off, but Leah doesn''t have the ability to. Leah hesitates before steeling her resolve. If she had merely been infected with the forest''s way before, now she''ll have it look at her. < Grand Asvarki, hilo solva, phi''loge filansi hega c''i''ola begiel hirenga > As brambles cut into her eyes, Leah smiles softly. (2) SILENCE IN PURGATORY (2) The brambles that cut into her eyes are decaying little things. Bark alike to dried animal skin, peeling and scaled, with parched leaves and dead flowers adorning the vine¡ªits brittleness is misleading, with strength comparable to tempered steel. Soon, it will only grow, and its roots will spread all over her body before consuming it. The bramble vine, in all its half-hearted sentience, particularly enjoys nesting in a prey''s eyes to destroy their sight. It is the vine''s greatest pleasure to provoke despair. Leah knew this all fairly well. The bramble wasn''t some backlash for her prying, but her requested reward. As a plant rooted in mysticism rather than the untamed world, its properties were only restrained by its symbolism. Thus, when it took away her "sight", it would actually limit her awareness. She would be blind, deaf, mute, anosmic¡ªonly her sense of touch would remain. All would return to silence. Despite it being part of her plan, Leah remained weary. She was maiming herself. There was an instinctive disquiet, impulsive disgust there. Letting the bramble vine burrow into her body without struggling took as much resolve as asking for it. It was an inferior organism, as vanishingly insignificant as an ant, her new body screamed. It would shackle her. Her body wanted to return to the cosmos, dissolving into the stars, to become part of something much bigger and greater than she could ever be. Everything would have a part of her. Leah ignored it. Wasn''t it just a fancy way of saying she wouldn''t exist? The final moment to regret comes and skips past her. The dark horizon falls. Then, there is nothing¡ªonly darkness beyond the pitchest black. It was as if everything were erased. As if she was all that was left. As if... There was nothing! Nothing! <...> Was she moving? Speaking? Where... were the people? The bramble couldn''t block off everything, so surely she could still bump into things? Leah came to the abrupt realization that she hadn''t come into contact with any humans after her death and ensuing revival. However real her body felt to her, it wasn''t actually flesh and blood. Would they just slide through her? Were her senses so impaired that she would never know? The idea made her feel vaguely ill. Her only respite was how hungry she was. It was ironic how much Leah''s hunger had become a comfort for her. It was the only thing she had left. It was undeniable that Leah had... changed. If all the components of the ship had been replaced, was it still the same ship? Even disregarding the instincts of her new body, the untamed world had already drowned out the deceased little twelve-year-old girl. A sugar child dissolved in water is only sweet. There is no child left. From a certain standpoint, she stopped existing the moment she tore open the shadow. <...> No. The ship was still the same, Leah believed. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. To posit the ship as distinct means to imbue it with a human-like identity. If not, change would be insignificant. A ship is a ship; it has neither consciousness nor recognition of change. Only sapient species have an identity which is falsely permanent. Such identities change from bow to stern as time progresses, effectually replacing the ship¡ªyet ownership remains. The soul is the helmsman of the vessel. She still thought of ''Leah'' as herself. That was all that mattered. Right. Well. She ought to set off. Shaking off the lingering pains of dissociation, Leah considered her exact position without the benefit of sight. The sheer silence was as ominous as always. At least her memory had improved. Before she implanted the brambles into her eyes, she had been facing the mountains to the east, with the forest and the rising sun far at her back. That was good¡ªshe was still in the slums. Judging from the faint whiff of ethanol and general fermentation she felt near the beginning of her whole misadventure, she had been reborn near the Happy House. It was a den of illegal prostitution but its popularity was ensured regardless by being the only tavern outside of city proper. None of the slumies could afford such indulgences in the winter, of course, but lower class citizens still had the coin to spare. It did explain why she hadn''t run into any humans yet. Most of the Happy House''s patrons were hungover, drunk, or cuddling with a whore by now. The tavern itself wouldn''t reopen until noon. Only then would the House welcome new guests. It was almost hard to believe the sun still existed in her current state, but. No humans. No humans meant no real risks. From here, she return to her body. She could... go home. If she was honest with herself, she didn''t know what she wanted with her return. She was dead. She couldn''t pretend to be what she once was, even in the unlikely event that her mother would accept her. Perhaps her deceased body would have some use... She wouldn''t know until she tried. It wasn''t like she had anywhere else to go. Slowly, she began to walk. It felt more like floating. It was odd, to not have any weight. She was light enough for the wind to take her alive; now, there was nothing for the wind to catch. Out of curiosity, Leah dug her toes into the earth¡ªor at least what she thought was the ground¡ªand went jittery with static electricity. Her sense of touch had degraded into interference fields, basically. Marvelous. She couldn''t do anything fancy with ground vibrations then. She''d have to be careful or she''d be lost in the darkness. At least that made one mystery solved. ...It was very quiet. Maddeningly silent. Had she ever known such alienation? Her thoughts grew quieter as she ventured deeper into the dark. Where before she could think and plan, now she was drifting. Not literally, it was very important that she stayed on the road¡ªyet she was losing something, growing disoriented. Time creeped by leisurely under her sole witness. There was nothing but darkness and static. It was as if she was being eaten. Then the static disappeared. It was gone1. Did she fall? Or was it a fake? Just a fever dream, the mere delusions of a dead little girl... Maybe the darkness took her. It was largely irrelevant. Was it? It wasn''t just fear, so much as... Well, Leah hardly knew. Words could never express it, that feeling. Not any words that she knew. All that remained was the crowded emptiness of a world and a girl left behind; the lucidity of a mind gone quiet, so far from life and light that they could only be a summer night''s dream; and a single soul swallowed by a darkness it could not pierce. Leah screamed without a sound. <...........> Ravenous hunger flared up as her mind nearly fell into chaos. Leah deliriously focused on her hunger once again. Right. She had forgotten they were inseparable. Panic was one hell of a drug. She was alright. It wasn''t a dream. She was fine. It was okay. Static or no, she could make it. Soon, she would be home. All she had to do was walk.