Exalted: Out Of The Eater

It's kind of funny isn't it? Thirst has a taste, hunger has a flavor all its own. The absence of the thing becomes a presence in and of itself.

A mouthful of sand, of mud and fired river-clay, coating your tongue and caking the inside of you throat. A throbbing in your softer tissues, in your kidneys, matched by a muffled pounding in your head. Hammers wrapped in cotton, every heartbeat an impact on the inside of your skull; your brain swollen two sizes too large for the bone that encloses it. Below: a nest of rats, worrying away at the inside your stomach. Bald, worm-like tails trailing over the lining of your guts as the sleek-furred things chitter and scratch; crawling over each other, circling, searching for a way out. Your body riding that borderline, straddling that boundary between intense nausea and near starvation.

It hurts but you can bear it. It aches but you've been here before. You know your limits don't you? Better than most, better than those soldiers that surround you maybe. You know how much more you have left in you; how many more shaky miles on unsteady legs, how many more ragged, wheezing breaths with torn up lungs. You know you could keep going if you had to, you've done it before and isn't that the way you handle everything?

You've done it before. You've had worse. You can do this. You can survive, you can endure, and you never think you can in the moment but then you grit your teeth and put one foot in front of the other anyway. Shoulder the next burden, no matter how much your arms tremble. And there's the joke because one day you'll think you can and won't be able to. One day you'll give up, give in, and the broken, bandaged up mess you are on the inside will finally implode. And you'll die there kneeling in the dust, tears streaming down your face and bawling as twenty-something years of suppressed anger and grief and pain and shame comes flooding out in a single instant. In the handful of seconds before the sword is drawn and the blade bites into your throat.

Or...maybe not. Maybe at the end you'll die as you lived: mute and meek and with nothing really worth saying anyway. It doesn't really matter, it doesn't bear thinking about; either way that day's not today.

You think. You hope. You never know, it might be if you can't make up your fucking mind.

It's late afternoon now and the vast crowd of unsorted helots mills aimlessly all around you. Most purposeless, too exhausted to really keep moving, not brave enough to actually sit. Some searching, looking for separated companions and lost kin; you hear their voices, tense and fraught. Calling out names as loud as they dare; a list, a litany of half-heard syllables and desperate questions, floating on the breeze.



Lift your chin; enjoy the wind that comes down from the North, from the Yanaze River. A steady, cool thing that dries the sweat and leeches away some of the oppressive, omnipresent heat. A brief reprieve after the day, too little and too late to make much of a difference but not unappreciated. It helps blunt your hunger, your thirst, the two needs all but screaming in your ears. Your hand drifts up, thumb touched to the scarlet stone hanging just beneath your tunic. Feeling the outline of the little rock. Pressing the toker closer to your chest in a nervous gesture as you think.

You lick your lips despite yourself. Feeling chapped, dead skin catch and tug; feeling the corners of your mouth, small cuts stinging. Your palm slips down until it's pressed to your sunken stomach. The shadow of muscle just beneath the skin, like stones sunk beneath a few millimeters of water. The bone of your ribs all but showing through the cloth, fabric hanging loose, flesh stretched so tight. Your fingers half-crook themselves into claws; like you can keep the rats caged, like you can keep them from eating their way out through your navel and spilling, glossy and fat onto the ground.

"(I...how hungry are you? I think we can-)"

And then Jason cheerfully takes you by the arm and promptly steers you through the crowd of dead-eyed men and empty-faced women, the hundreds waiting to be portioned and partitioned. Narrowly dodging a unit of heavy infantry wading into crush, empty space forming around them as everyone abruptly tries to be somewhere else, anywhere else. They clink like a rich man's purse with every step, crimson cloth barely muffling the shifting mass of metal. Swathed in scarlet coats, crowned in silvery steel; overlapping fishscales spreading over their chests and backs, trailing thickened leather layers that hang over their thighs, the tails of their long coats. A heavy skirt sewn with more glittering mirrors. Every step is a swaying, a parting of strata. Like fanned sheets of paper, ruffled back by a pair of thumbs. Their eyes just points of light in the shadows of their helms, above the aquiline, angled masks that cover their cheeks, their jaws. Their line spreads out behind you, cutting you off from the rest. A no man's land, growing wider with every passing second.

He lets you go then, lets you walk ahead, and you glance back with a shy, almost sheepish expression. Absently pushing back stray spikes of hair as the two of you join the crowd clustered around a half-unpacked wagon. A line of guards in lighter armor, dark hide strips and a single piece of harness for the vitals, chain veils for faces. They don't speak to you, they don't even look at you, don't even touch you. One shoves a torn off chunk of bread into your hands, another drops a strip of some smoked meat into your grip. There's barrels of water just past them; long-handled ladles bobbing in the dark, fractals of frost, faint snow still clinging to the insides.

A few deep draughts of water, just enough, the minimum you need; so cold you almost gasp and gag as it ices its way down your throat. You go in for another and a guard jerks his chin, hand on the hilt of his sword, and you drop the ladle with a swallow. Fading back into the reduced crowd, still hundreds strong here. Jason follows you a second later; maneuvering you like a shield or a battering ram through the knots of helots, the dazed stragglers, to a cleared, raised rock. A dusty ledge but you'll take it and you all but sob as you finally let your legs give out and slump down. Him groaning under his breath as he lowers himself beside you. Still wearing that faint, utterly unapologetic smile, those grey eyes gleaming with something that could be amusement. And it's nice you think. To see someone who could almost be happy despite everything.

You forgot what that was like.

The two of you sit in comfortable silence. A small island of stability, security, amidst the press. His body so close to yours, his leg against yours, the two of you together, he with you and you with him and you-

You forgot what that was like too.

Stare at the food in your hand, the scraps, and you have to fight the urge to drool. It's really not much, some kind of dark rye and a slice of savory pork. You want it. You want it more than anything you've ever wanted in your life, you want it so badly it hurts. But that's...exactly it isn't it? Because you can bear it, because you know your limits, because you've done plenty with even less and you- if the two of you make it through this, if you survive at all, it won't be because your hunger was oh-so-slightly slaked by a bit of pig.

You have to jerkily lift your arm like a mechanical crane, swinging your hand over his lap, all but prying your fingers apart to let it fall. Eyes going back to your own diminished meal so you don't have to watch it vanish. The rats screech in protest, subsiding for a second as you ravenously rip into the half-loaf that's all you have left.

"Wh-"

"You're stronger than me," you say through a mouthful, fighting down the urge to snap at him, "Matters more that you can keep it up, keep from losing it. I'm already a scarecrow. I need less anyway."

It's not really even a lie either but you hope he doesn't offer it back. You don't think you can part with it a second time. You don't think you can keep from snatching it from his hand and cramming the whole thing into your greedy maw. But he doesn't. Because in the end he's like you, he understands, he can see the facts laid out before you. Instead he just looks at it, jaws parted, paused in the middle of whatever he was going to say; that small smile flickering, fading a few degrees before he nods shallowly.

You grunt in something like appreciation.

You try not to be too jealous of him. The people who live on the riverside don't really have it easier, they're only fed more because they have to lift more, but you still think about it as you chew. Wondering if you could have been taller, could have been stronger, if your shoulders would be broader and your chest deeper. Wondering if you were just born slender or it's a product of your parents hedging their bets, feeding their firstborn, feeding the youngest and most vulnerable ahead of the middle child. Wondering what it'd be like to be actually muscular, actually masculine, instead of this thing of twine and stitched rawhide. You bet it'd feel pretty great, at least before the next sweep.

A torn off chunk of meat drops on top of your last bite of bread. You tense up, gritting your teeth, eyes cutting to your right. To the blonde haired man with a jawline to kill for, staring off into the middle distance. He shrugs without looking back.

"One chunk wouldn't make much-" a flash of faintly yellowed teeth and it's gone, it's gone and you're sitting with your head hunched down, tears prickling the corners of your eyes, feeling just a little lower than an animal. Doing your best to ignore the way the rats celebrate. He shifts next to you. Drapes his arm around your bony neck, brawny forearm resting along a pectoral. He doesn't say anything else, just pretends not to notice as your breath hitches with small, sad hiccups.

You get half an hour to sit there and soak in it. Half an hour to just enjoy the feeling of being something like desired, to have something like affection. He doesn't just want to fuck you, you think. You honestly wouldn't mind if he did: it's fine, it's the way it works. You take what companionship you can find with who you can find it and you're on the better side of average, he could do worse. No he just...seems to like you. The two of you watching as the long snake of humanity winds its way through the village to the vast, empty square cut into the slope below. The army's tents already springing up on every side of Ivory Bones like a forest of canvas.

You could have been hit by a bolt of lightning out of the blue sky at any point during those thirty minutes and you would've died happy.

It ends with a sharp, shrill whistle. You start to your feet, you turn and to help him up but he's already there. Faintly amused at your instincts, at the way you avert your eyes and try to fight down the flush that feathers its way up your cheeks. And no, you don't hold hands as you muster up with the other laborers, the other slaves, you don't invite that kind of attention. But your fingers do brush his and he glances at you, half-surprised and half expectant. It's a good look on him, you find that you like it.

They march you out through the gates, into the surrounding plains. The quarries barely a quarter mile away, to the East the mountain ramparts reach up; white peaks so cold, so remote, so out of reach.

About the work they have you do what is there to say? The sky is stained orange by the time you start, streaked with yellows and reds as the sun slips lower and lower. It's an ugly, infected light, a kind of feverish glow that's captured and reflected in the heads of the pick-axes and spades they passed out to you. Thaumaturges call upon their elementals, dogs of stone and shattered earth, hydra-headed rock-worms, marble-sculpted scorpion-men with gemstone eyes, to make the first fissures, carve the first cracks into the unyielding ground. A shudder underfoot, a kind of tearing, a sort of parting; like the edges of a laceration being pulled away from each other. A shallow cut scored into the soil, widened into a true wound.

They bid you dig and so you dig.

You peel back the skin of the Creation. Gouge out it's loamy flesh, turn those first furrows into ditches, those ditches into trenches; hundreds of metal spikes and metal wedges ripping and tearing into the ground. Hundreds of helots working in almost silent synchronicity. There's no singing, no talking, just gasps of exertion and hoarse wheezing as backs slowly wrench themselves up to screaming and hands are worn red. You and Jason, two among the thousand; faceless and irrelevant. But with every thrown shovelful on the earthworks slowly taking shape you finally get a chance to look back. Stare back the way you came at the solid pillar of white perched on the rim of the world; still as thick as your finger, even at this distance. The Elemental Pole of Earth, vast beyond all imagining. Descending to the blurred out base, rising to spear the heavens. Five hundred foot high thunderheads like wispy, puffy halos at this distance, ringing the titanic column.

Realize you've been staring for longer than a handful of heartbeats, you make to throw yourself back into the labor before anyone sees. But then a... shadow passes over you, a shape in the clear late-afternoon sky. You frown and tilt your head back. Jason notices, mimicking the motion a second later.

It's the airship from before, returning from the North. It's escort reduced, the underside scorched and blackened in great starbusts of soot, enormous claw-marks along the bellies of the cabins. Two of the propellers have stopped working entirely, the air currents around them laced with smoke. Sparks spinning out with every turn of the enormous turbines. It limps past you, for a moment you think it'll stop at the village, at the army camp but it doesn't. A few of the escort craft split off but the rest just...keep going.

Back West. Back to the City.

You and Jason exchange a look and as one get back to work. Trying to ignore the slow-curdling feeling in your stomach.

It is the 21st of Descending Fire. Calibration is coming. It won't spare you.

But...still. It's easier if you let your mind drift, it's easier if you just let your focus slip. Whatever's going to happen then there's nothing you can really do about it right now. And, sure, coherent thought is hard when you can barely breathe but you have rote memory. Old stories from a dimly recalled family.

[ ] Think on the Divine. There are no gods for Helots but that is so very far from imagining that there are no gods. They exist everywhere within the Empire, governing Creation in the name of the Dragons. And even if their stories are not your stories...well. They're still pleasing things nonetheless.
[ ] Think on the Dead. Helots walk hand in hand with their own deaths, always shadowed by their own demise. And you know enough to know that in the land of the slaves the other side and its monsters are closer to the waking world than they should be. It's a grim topic true, but familiar for all that.
[ ] Think on the Damned. You know them from sermons delivered by the Listeners, the inhabitants of a world of brass and green fire. As far from Creation as Creation is from the Unconquered Sun. But your mother had stories as well. And for all that it's forbidden it's still delicious to dwell on them.
[ ] Think on the Outsiders. Creation is a walled garden and they are the beasts that prowl the Wyld without. Creatures of nightmare and insatiable hunger, unquenchable drives. In this Iron Age their raids rarely penetrate past the Empire's borders, but the scars they left during the Invasion run deep.