COFFIN's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Coffin came down from the boulder at dawn. The red veins in the black stone still pulsed where his blood had dried. His mask itched along the jaw, a slow heat that had not been there yesterday. He pressed two fingers to it and felt a hairline crack run from his chin to his cheek. Something inside the bone was pushing out. He needed to test it before it tested him. He hunted down a centipede-shaped hollow drinking at a salt pool and let it see him first. It came fast, segmented body whipping, human face screaming from the front of it. Coffin did not dodge. He took the first strike on his shoulder and drove his hand through its mouth. The crack on his mask split wider with the impact. Heat poured out of the split. He ate the centipede where it fell and waited to see what would happen to his face. The pain came in waves. He walked until his legs failed, then crawled. He stopped in a low basin where the ground glowed faint purple under the dust. He lay on his back and let the mask break. It came apart in long crystal plates, blue and violet, splintering outward from his eyes. Dark fluid leaked through the seams and ran down his neck. Underneath, his face was not a face yet. It was something soft and unfinished, with two burning points where eyes wanted to be. He did not scream. He counted. He had decided long ago that screaming was for things, not for a who. He counted to a number he forgot, and then he counted again. The plates of the old mask fell around him and drove themselves point-first into the soft earth. The ground cracked. Crystal shards pushed up through the dirt in a ring around his body, blue and sharp, lit from beneath by the same purple glow. He was making a crater without moving. When he could stand, he stood. A thin shell of pale light wrapped him from shoulder to ankle, folded over itself like layered cloth. Through it his silhouette looked taller, thinner, wrong in a way he could not name. He pulled the photograph from his ribs with a hand that was almost still his hand. The yellow-eyed woman stared back. He said, out loud, the only word that mattered. "Mine." The voice was not the voice he had climbed the boulder with. It was lower, and it belonged to him. He stepped out of the ring of crystal and left the broken plates of his old mask behind. The hunger was sharper now, and more particular. Common meat would not touch it. Somewhere far ahead, something older than most things that still moved had felt the crater open, and had turned its attention fully toward him. Coffin walked toward it.