The air is worse, thick with ash, reeking of decay. Illarion--alive, sighted, beautifully symmetric in his outward self--gasps for it anyway as he struggles from the rotting sea. He can't not, even as he regrets it instantly--even as he feels the sting of pyrolyzed plastics and organic volatiles deep in lung and air sac and breathing bone. An awful reflexive inhuman cough wracks him before he can catch it back; there is blood on the back of his tongue. Gas, he thinks dimly, already reaching for the mask hung round his neck.
Stars and saints look kindly on the Dog Keeper and his gifts, even if the filters are wet and the seal doesn't quite fit. Better a struggle to breathe than drowning in his own blood.
The awful little shelter catches his attention, once he's got it to spare. Even through fogged and watering eyes the figure inside's familiar and the shrike can't help a rasping laugh. The mere noise turns his stomach.
He gulps back acid and trudges up the ashy dunes to present himself to God.
"This is she?" he croaks by way of greeting, gesturing around them. Ironic echo of a meeting on another, fairer beach in another, fairer month. This is the world that died? In war, he assumes; in the Conflagration that Imperial philosophers put so much stock in.
He doesn't know the worst of it. Nephele was--would be--spared one horror Earth wasn't; no one considered whether a nuclear reactor might be used to birth weapons. No one needed to, in a world that held the Throne, where loose fragments of its divinity could be used to the same ends.
eventual cws: graphic radiation sickness, gas injuries, mercy kill
The air is worse, thick with ash, reeking of decay. Illarion--alive, sighted, beautifully symmetric in his outward self--gasps for it anyway as he struggles from the rotting sea. He can't not, even as he regrets it instantly--even as he feels the sting of pyrolyzed plastics and organic volatiles deep in lung and air sac and breathing bone. An awful reflexive inhuman cough wracks him before he can catch it back; there is blood on the back of his tongue. Gas, he thinks dimly, already reaching for the mask hung round his neck.
Stars and saints look kindly on the Dog Keeper and his gifts, even if the filters are wet and the seal doesn't quite fit. Better a struggle to breathe than drowning in his own blood.
The awful little shelter catches his attention, once he's got it to spare. Even through fogged and watering eyes the figure inside's familiar and the shrike can't help a rasping laugh. The mere noise turns his stomach.
He gulps back acid and trudges up the ashy dunes to present himself to God.
"This is she?" he croaks by way of greeting, gesturing around them. Ironic echo of a meeting on another, fairer beach in another, fairer month. This is the world that died? In war, he assumes; in the Conflagration that Imperial philosophers put so much stock in.
He doesn't know the worst of it. Nephele was--would be--spared one horror Earth wasn't; no one considered whether a nuclear reactor might be used to birth weapons. No one needed to, in a world that held the Throne, where loose fragments of its divinity could be used to the same ends.
He doesn't know he's already dead.