Anywhos, have another two bits:
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I stand, walk, live in a city that is decaying, crumbling and falling apart. As all cities are. Every city everywhere is in a constant state of ‘fixing up’, regeneration and decay at the same time. Or more, they were.
My name is of little importance, but if you must, you may call me Xell.
That’s ‘Zell’ or ‘Cell’, depending on how you feel like saying it. It doesn’t much matter to me how you say it, I just wish I had someone who could.
Ever since the Descent people have been few and far between.And by that I mean that I haven’t seen any humans since my parents, who likely left me as the sole heir to the human race.
I don’t count the demons below. They call themselves by all sorts of new names, in tongues descendant from the human tongues of old. But I don’t recognize them as human, despite their claims of being the future of the race. However it’s looking like I’m losing that argument, considering how many of them there are, and how few of me there is left.
Night is the worst. They can see in the dark, the Hums. And the Micken’s’. All of them, really. I’m running out of candles to keep the light during the night. The surface raids are coming more frequently now. It seems their ‘civilizations’ never really forgot the bounty of the surface.
But it wouldn’t take them long to steal me. Or kill me.
---
He stood silently against the backdrop of my burning home. I was only seven years old. I walked up to him, his back was to me. The path was steep and rocky, but I pulled my broken bones up anyway. When I finally stood next to him, on the over hang so high above the village I once called my home, he turned violently and tore down the hill. I turned painfully to watch him leave. A solider, perhaps the only one I would ever see cry in my life, for my life.
That’s all I remember from my dream after I wake up. I wake up whole and safe, warm in my bed. Turning over, I pull the covers up higher, trying to recall anything more of the dream I had been having every night for the last nine years. Pulling up the sleeve on my nightgown, I see nothing more than my arm. No branding burn, no scars from hard labour under the hot sun. No broken bones, nothing that would prove that the night in my dream had ever happened.
I wouldn’t even entertain the idea if it weren’t for my one big secret. My Secret, the one even my parents don’t know all the way through is that I died once. When I was seven. The foster home took me in, and I have no memory of any time before that, except the snags I can pull from my dreams.
What I’ve put together is that I was once a child in a small, remote village in a war-torn country. My village was taken by soldiers who branded us as slaves, then burned our village to the ground. My parents fought, so they beat me to bring them to submission, and then left me to die when they would not complied and had to be killed. One of the soldiers regrets the whole things. He still cries at night.
No one would believe me if I told them, because the night I was found, I had no broken bones, no scars, nothing like that. No tot mention I was found in the heart of San Francisco, thousands of miles from where I believe I was born.
I had a psychologist once, when I was twelve. He said that in my hypothetical situation, as I had posed the question to him hypothetically, I could be repressing my actual past and only allowing myself to see a stylised version of it that my mind could accept. Something to do with post-traumatic stress disorder. He didn’t understand. This isn’t a fantasy, a dream. It is the truth. Somehow, I really was once her.
My name is of little importance, but if you must, you may call me Xell.
That’s ‘Zell’ or ‘Cell’, depending on how you feel like saying it. It doesn’t much matter to me how you say it, I just wish I had someone who could.
Ever since the Descent people have been few and far between.And by that I mean that I haven’t seen any humans since my parents, who likely left me as the sole heir to the human race.
I don’t count the demons below. They call themselves by all sorts of new names, in tongues descendant from the human tongues of old. But I don’t recognize them as human, despite their claims of being the future of the race. However it’s looking like I’m losing that argument, considering how many of them there are, and how few of me there is left.
Night is the worst. They can see in the dark, the Hums. And the Micken’s’. All of them, really. I’m running out of candles to keep the light during the night. The surface raids are coming more frequently now. It seems their ‘civilizations’ never really forgot the bounty of the surface.
But it wouldn’t take them long to steal me. Or kill me.
---
He stood silently against the backdrop of my burning home. I was only seven years old. I walked up to him, his back was to me. The path was steep and rocky, but I pulled my broken bones up anyway. When I finally stood next to him, on the over hang so high above the village I once called my home, he turned violently and tore down the hill. I turned painfully to watch him leave. A solider, perhaps the only one I would ever see cry in my life, for my life.
That’s all I remember from my dream after I wake up. I wake up whole and safe, warm in my bed. Turning over, I pull the covers up higher, trying to recall anything more of the dream I had been having every night for the last nine years. Pulling up the sleeve on my nightgown, I see nothing more than my arm. No branding burn, no scars from hard labour under the hot sun. No broken bones, nothing that would prove that the night in my dream had ever happened.
I wouldn’t even entertain the idea if it weren’t for my one big secret. My Secret, the one even my parents don’t know all the way through is that I died once. When I was seven. The foster home took me in, and I have no memory of any time before that, except the snags I can pull from my dreams.
What I’ve put together is that I was once a child in a small, remote village in a war-torn country. My village was taken by soldiers who branded us as slaves, then burned our village to the ground. My parents fought, so they beat me to bring them to submission, and then left me to die when they would not complied and had to be killed. One of the soldiers regrets the whole things. He still cries at night.
No one would believe me if I told them, because the night I was found, I had no broken bones, no scars, nothing like that. No tot mention I was found in the heart of San Francisco, thousands of miles from where I believe I was born.
I had a psychologist once, when I was twelve. He said that in my hypothetical situation, as I had posed the question to him hypothetically, I could be repressing my actual past and only allowing myself to see a stylised version of it that my mind could accept. Something to do with post-traumatic stress disorder. He didn’t understand. This isn’t a fantasy, a dream. It is the truth. Somehow, I really was once her.
---
There you have it mon amis~ Expect more at some point maybe.
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