(OOC Content Warning: Depictions of horror imagery and gore are used.) (OOC: Thank you for reading this short story!) {Ineradicable} Atmospheric Music: Spoiler Beneath the catacombs of a sewage system, laid the spindling silhouette of a perched vulture. The vulture's wings spread themselves apart, unveiling into what was actually that of a crooked down figure, with their bulbously mechanical eyes searing down into the finicky waters along the ruinous coast of an ancient Crookback from before. The moon hung itself over, singing with the breeze as each note of its luminescence bled down into the wafting sea beyond. The chorus of haunting hymns sunk deep into the fogs of the maritime winds, proclaiming of what foundations were lost much before the man before them arrived. Fervors of the flocking fish danced by the waters, splashing and spitting bits of salty, residual draught through the air which the fisherman breathed. {} The fisherman was none other than the mess of an sentient being, Cordol. His mechanical eyes sifted down into the waters which burnt their nauseously nautical salt into the docks of which he stood, creating fissures of the eroded bark by the watery plateau's cliff. The fisherman stared their alienatingly green eyes down into the depths of the sewage drenched sea, filled with the carcasses of derelict debris and the pilfering sewage that overflew from the wayside. There was nothing of an emotion at this point, none of disgust nor apprehension towards raiding the watery for its 'delicacies'. They needed to survive, they were compelled to simply endure, no matter how dementedly doomed their circumstances fell to become. {} With the waver of an alchemical burnt-white glove, the goon set their fingers below the water's surface. Bits of the leftover rubbish filtered by their exposed fingertips, now displaying the new metal which formed the bones inside their limbs. The metal was unfeeling to them, numbed by the diluted heart which continued to beat beneath their own conscious. They were losing their own mind to the necessities of adaption, adaption to the cynical loneliness that they drove themselves into. Their mind twisted down, unveiling the need to capture the rapturous sterling fish which entangled themselves beneath. Plucking their fingers down into the waters, a click of the warping steel along their knuckles sprayed off into the passage of polluted sullens that formed the maritime beyond. {} A fish lurked by, willing to give the chance of the fingertips its own comfort. They foresaw the tattered glove warbling down unsteadily beneath the waters they swam upon. It was alienated, unknowing and unable to move, it seemed to be something of a lure. The lure was beyond the shadow of sheer curiosity, the need to experiment with their own conscious desires as they were a fish. A fish ate plants, a fish ate minnows, yet the fish still had the semblance of truly damning curiosity filtering down their vertebrate. {} Another fish took towards the palm at that point, seeing it for what remnants of a tattered glove still hung tightly to the darkened bones underneath. They remained perennially petrified in the distance, unwilling to partake in the glove's own curiosity, seeing it for a part of what it remained. Just as the fish beforehand, they wished to eat, yet they did not wish to find themselves dragged up to the surface by the maw of a maddened creature behind. There was nothing of trust, there was only the cold predictability sifting beyond. {} The former fish took into the palm, rippled between the mitt, before being upheaved and rocketed towards the fresh eve beyond. They were dragged without knowing, without anything beyond the accidental manipulation of the madman. Gluing their fishy, dome-like eyeballs onto the cold, barren sights of the predating fiend which laid beyond, the fish struggled. Its gills puffed apart, silting into the atmosphere along which its corridor flung apart. Alas, the grip of a steely hand's quintet kept the fish in place, placing them onto the coastal edge as they suffocated. {} All the while they watched the fish, the fiend beyond held their own gaze of perplexation. It was only the means of endure the probabilities they found themself in. They held nothing of regret, nor anything of remorse at the end of the suffrage they witnessed. During the weeks before, the man would not have fished in the sea. They waltzed around for the freed food of those at the Alms, hungering by on the passive acceptance of those able to drive their deranged obsession for pity. Yet, now they only watched with an unbearable acceptance of their changes. Their situation was as corruptive as the bones which were embedded beneath the inorganically constructed flesh they adorned. They were little more than a ravenous animal, a horrible husk, than anything of the aggressed man which remained before. {} A sputter sounded out, the fish was dead. At the sight of the marine carcass that laid along the dock's own edge, the fiend went to pick up their own prey. Their arms hoisted across the sides of its fins, dangling down the scaled flesh, as internal substances leaked out through the gills and face, bludgeoning themselves with thunderous thumps into the dock's welded wood underneath. The slushy, orangish water now precipitated back into the warped wood, forming puddles of the slimy gunk that contaminated the once pristine duo of the civilized and the sea. {} The monstrous man held their fingers along the fish's tail, crumpling a thumb down against the back, as they towed it over towards one of the nearby ruins along the ramshackled city they took refuge within. Only the sounds of the fluttering zephyrs across the oceanic plain treaded along at this hour, as the goon gained themselves footing within the building. They approached along bearings of scattered, icy glass which chipped into the wooden rot across the flooring underneath. The ceiling seeped with insectoid arthropods commuting between the cracks as leftover metaphorical shells were disposed across the floor, though salt-pebbles marking a blizzarded street. The monger found his home. {} Crouching besides a bended wall, they took hold upon a piece of siphoned-out glass. It was jagged at its edge, ripped and primed for beginning to process of preparing the fish for more possible consumption. Calmly, the makeshift blade fell itself down onto the scales, ripping apart as the animal's flesh was replaced with the hardline material. Scales were torn asunder, flung aside and scattered along the floor, as excess juices from the freshened meat bled into the man's own engineered tendons. At points, the glass connected with the steel, leaving lightened scrapes along the metal as it continued to slice apart the fish. {} After the process of opening the fish was completed, the man went to gouge the fish with such broken glass, tearing its organs outwards for a dissected process to remove the inedible parts. That, or the man's own derangement left him bearing on animalistic anatomy to fuel his own obsessive nostalgia for the past. He was a medical worker, at a point, the type that could open flesh and tear back into it. The humane flesh was only a fish's at this point, the same as it always was to him. {} A distinction was lacking. {} The mummified fiend drew a few fingers upon the edge of their prey, dumping the excess blood and organs onto the flooring underneath. A pile was forming at this point, filled with the fishy eyeballs and internal pieces that scattered across. Crimson was staining now, as well, lapped up and licked due to their recent addiction. The addiction of power that festered in their mind, they vampirism which entangled itself into the man's crazed stature. {} They went to bring their mouth up towards the fish's leaking intestines. The opposite palm they still had, adorned with a more pristine glove, was dampened and now submerged in the bacterial blood of a wild animal. Nevertheless, they took the palm to their own mummified face, peeling at the bandages to expose the bits of humanity underneath. The man's face was more humane to whatever extent revealed itself, at least by the exposure of his chapped lips jutting out from beyond numerous folds. Sweat and grease rolled down his face as he drew his addictive breath to the fish's internal liquids, on the verge of sipping into the body which contaminated his mind. It would be only sooner before he found more intentional victims, victims to display the pent of desecration of his tastes. {} Yet, at the touch of the fish's blood rolling onto his already tomatoed lips, the lunatic lurched backwards. Their face crumpled down into a scowl. It was not a scowl of hatred nor anything of true terror, it was only the unwilling desperation of which craned down their masquerade's features. They stammered for a minute, keeping the fish in their grasp, as they stared out towards the lifeless eyes trickling with red down. They had been drinking fish dry for multiple days at this point, continuously left to rot in their own isolation. The monger pondered all the chances that were spoken of, all of the redemptive opportunities he found himself to buy as he stared daggers into the fish. {} Unable to drink anything more of their own isolative silence, the man glanced back towards the lowed lighting beyond the night, as they drank into the fish. They knew they became expired to the mannerisms of which they used to be. Barely humanoid at the point, the man sifted down into only the last burn-out of overwhelming emotion for the night. The velvet smeared across their masquerade, imbedding itself firmly into their face, as they haphazardly crashed back into a wall behind. They grasped at their own mummification, beginning to tear it asunder as the whole of their humanist identity fell apart at the moments. {} The goon was barely alive in their own psyche, now warped by the pressure of afflictions and the steels that entrenched deep into the core of their body. Beyond anything of recollection to their previous sanity, the man held himself by the masking, yet continued to furiously rip apart the façade he crafted only years ago. His fingertips etched down with their needily nails, peeling apart the bloodstained bandaging and leaving it aside to reveal the lone face of an insatiably corrupted man, addicted to the menace he created as himself. {} The rags of bandaging were scraped along the floor, discarded and left strewn abode by the kneecaps that crashed simultaneously along with them. The greyed-out fish was flung aside, flopping into the pile with the rest, as the man's own daily cycle converged onto himself. The idea of inflicting anything of vengeful taste upon each and every minnow he foresaw left nothing of satisfaction. The psychological warfare that he could bring the animals meant nothing anymore, it became time to fuel the addiction. The addiction overcame his senses, as his fleshy, unfiltered beard of a face hung down loosely by the boards which he kneeled upon. {} Answering a few low breaths out from beyond his face, the man's mechanical eyes watered for the first moments in many eves. The teary liquid of bloodcurdling clear mixed into the red still stained into his flesh. He was at another succeeding defeat. He lost to his addiction. Without the bearing of his own conscious thought strumming him together, he was nothing but a beast. The man began to forge himself as the violent monstrosity he was paved to become in his rogue isolation. Soon enough, only the boorish silhouette of what once was began to cross his vessel of a heart that night. He nothing more. He was nothing more than an animal.
