The Scion Cycle XLIX: The Hollow Man (part 1)

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Suggested Listening: Eric Serra - Mondoshawan

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Scion's Haven, Seattle
The End

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Scion woke in what seemed like his haven. The walls, what were left of them, were in the same places anyway, although they were crumbling and looked as if they had once been filled with scuttling things. Rotting timbers shone through in places, and the plaster of the walls, where it remained, hung grey and cracked like the floor of a desert after it had baked in the sun, flecking the earth the color of dead skin.

Scion peeled the threadbare rag blanket from his body and sat up in the broken remains of the bed, careful not to wake the corpse lying next to him. Cordelia's flesh hung slack on her bones, and the holes in her cheeks held wriggling white worms that buried themselves and gorged on her dead flesh. Scion brushed a stray strand of white hair away from her sunken, skeletal face and got to his feet.

The floorboards were warped and twisted, rubbed smooth in places and splintered in others. Rust-covered nails dotted the boards, many of them loose in the termite-eaten wood or half out of it.

Scion shambled over to the bedroom door. It lay open, hanging haphazardly from its single remaining hinge. Thick warped chunks of cracking paint mottled it, and part of it appeared to have been charred. He slipped into the main room.

The chandelier hung low, sideways and missing bits of crystal. What remained was cracked and covered in dust and cobwebs. The couches were rotting husks that long ago even the rats had abandoned. They were the lifeless bones of themselves, hung thinly with shabby rag upholstery that barely covered the sagging wood and rusty coils of the furniture.

The television was a jagged hole.

The coffee table lay flat and broken, and where an ash grey mold had once eaten away at it, now even the mold had died, and discoloration spread in mottled patterns over the rotten wood.

The adjacent kitchen bar had slumped in places, and the fish bowl on the counter lay cracked and stained with the remnants of some brackish liquid that had long since dried.

Scion made his way over to the night balcony garden. Here the French doors hung open as well, the glass broken out, stained black with time where it held on like jagged teeth here and there in the window panes. Torn gauzy remnants of the curtains fluttered in the chill like cauls. But the balcony was no more.

The building simply ended roughly, as if the whole thing had broken off and fallen.

Scion stepped to the edge and looked down. The city lay below, glittering in the half-light like dull emeralds, itself a wasteland. Jagged, broken towers loomed in the darkness, where no light shone, casting shadow over shadow. Here and there in the hollows of the nearby shattered buildings, things shambled past their windows, milk pale and hollow-eyed.

Coredelia wandered in behind him and he smiled. He could still remember her perfume, even over the smell of mold and rot.

"Oh God Scion... you're awake."

Scion turned, himself a shambling corpse, tattered clothes moving in the breeze as he did.

Cordelia's pallid corpse gasped as Scion's face came into the half-light.

"Your eyes..." she said, holding a rotting limb to her drooping jaw. "What... what happened to them?"

"It's going to be alright." he said, not bothering to sound as if he meant it.

[glow=white,2,300]Do thy eyes offend thee?[/glow]
"Yes Father." Scion answered in a hoarse whisper.

Cordelia wept.