Turn Right
You turn right, all the silver you own flicking out in a liquid pocketknife that curls slow around your neck and only dimples the skin with the soft pressure of a child’s breath. The song of silver, rushing in your head, only picks up new notes as you reach a guardroom, kill two of your jailors without a thought. You surface from- what is it? shock? a meditation? the killing-trance?- only enough to notice that neither of them wears red in long sleeves, has slender fingers to feed water and horse bread through the slot of a door. Would you have killed so quickly, if they had?
Silver has burnt away your change, cauterised- gilded- the stump of who you were, but you lock it through the slots and grooves it has carved in your flesh, anchoring it over you as a paper-thin exoskeleton that gives you the lip-curled tissue-foil mask of a tigress and threads new fibres of muscle and claw through the air- a menagerie of exposed anatomy that pulls you into a big cat’s crouch as you stalk the palace, climbing to the more habited levels. You let silver cradle your long-disused muscles, and walk with a four-footed sway on human hands and feet.
You stop only when natural light gleams off the plates of your metal- looking up at the Sun for long moments, letting it evaporate off your hot body in smoking coils.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 25 July 2016
The end (for now)