this is the man pulling on his iron chains
The sickness deeply soaks his bones.
He is saturated with it, filled with it, like a fatted thing stuffed with ruin. And though it’s been weeks since he unwittingly assisted in raising a place that stood for everything he was against, Ramiel suffers more now than ever. At night, he is hot, so hot that he thinks he will combust even in the chill of Fall. During the day, as the sun casts its’ bright on his faded coat, he shivers and shakes terribly. A cough rattles through his lungs frequently, phlegm forming like a ball he can’t swallow at the back of his throat. Tear stains run down his eyes, and whether or not it’s from fragments of memories poisoning his brain, even he’s not sure. Because images come to him often; he sees mountains, their facades gilded, a back-drop to frame faces that are always so blurry. But he doesn’t remember it.
He doesn’t remember any of it.
The dark places hold him within their shadows while he exists in his perpetual state of suffering. Shadows that reach out into the filamentous light pull him deeply into their embrace. They seem to find the pores of his skin and burrow, marking him, darkening him.
He is a thing of Carnage, after all.
Their God had resurrected him when he was long gone from this world. He plucked him from the cold embrace of Death, breathed life into his unmoving lungs, and gave him a purpose. Pangea has risen, he thinks, in awe of what they’d done. I have Risen, he thinks, too, in awe of what Carnage had done.
Ramiel can almost hear him now.
There is a boy in Pangea. A chill races through his stormcloud body then - a familiar sensation these days – but then he’s listening and seeing and believing. FIND HIM. KILL HIM. So he goes. Stumbling, dizzy, and disoriented the whole way, he goes to the raised kingdom. He trespasses on land that is Not Right, that is marked by all of its many sins. There is a crowd already swarming like a hive of angry wasps. At the center is the disease they must cut out. Eradicate. Erase.
So he jumps in. There is little strength in him, the sick ghost-who-should-be-dead. But he joins the fray and pulls himself towards the middle, nearer to the jostling bodies full of violence and frenzy. He seeks out the chestnut with eyes lit by his newfound salvation. KILL HIM, he thinks and tries to do just that. All for Carnage.
Ramiel