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Apr 3

Nothing Left

Author - Ghost (Me!) Characters - Floinn Mac an t-Sagairt Word Count - 4,965 Description - The fire in his chest guided him, it drove the knife deep and painted emerald a thick crimson. It is all he has left in the ashes of this wretched war.

Sun-kissed, Floinn woke with the morning mists furling across the emerald moors of a cliff-riven coastline, a crystalline sky bearing down on him from above while the dew underneath soaked into his furs and exposed linens. Winter lingered past its appointed hour, its overlong touch left pale wisps of rime along his boots’ seams that refused to thaw despite the springtime sun’s pointed glare. He rolled to his feet and scanned the frost-limned environs. The moorland was an empty stretch of emerald and jet intercut with slivers of diamond nipping where the colors could not bathe in sunlight. Wind howling; waves crashing against the coastline below; silence elsewhere; a serene world caught in repose. He frowned, rolled his shoulders, then packed up his meager campsite before smothering the dregs of his fire with a kick of dirt. Then he was off, trudging up the hillock and marching with the weight of his pack cutting into his shoulders.

It was a monotonous trek, but he was single-minded—led by the fire in his chest.

He had tracked them from the village they'd razed over moorlands and coastlines, and finally a tall set of white cliffs. He could not appreciate them: the bootprints were his fixation. Some sank deep into the mud, rivaling the mountain monarchs he'd hunted with his father. Other tracks had the short, shallow strides of small hurried feet. He'd followed these tracks, spent two weeks memorizing their shapes, imagining the women, children, and beasts who left them. Floinn had tried to put names to some, tried to recall their faces, but he'd learned to stop when the fire threatened to blaze out of control. He regarded the cuts and bruises he had taken along the way, the aching welt on the back of his head, the familiar bite of the long-arm between his shoulder blades, which had grown past discomfort. He saw his face in the reflection of a sodden bootprint, now worn and cracked like pottery, and his countenance darkened.

It would not be much farther.

Soon, the moor scraped low towards the waterline where a steep drop led to white sand and rocks stretching out into the spume-choked waves of the Muir Meann; the tide had receded. Driftwood, seashells and the twisted scraps of vessels clinging to their colors demarcated the berm dividing the shore. Steel and foul black iron clashed against the palette of his home. Wisps of sulfur stabbed through the salt and ice-bright grass. It was a place where the dichotomy of the world was on full display. His mind wandered through the fables spun by his mam when the sun dipped low, and he glared, the fright of his youth sublimating to vindictive choler.

He rushed forward, trying and failing to keep quiet under the weight of his pack. Agitation quickened in his throat. The moorland became a rocky promontory sheltering the beach below. It reached into the water as a headland, lowering until the ground became stacks cast into the sea like stones plucked by capricious children. If he was driven, he could bloody his fingers against the craggy rock and continue along the shore until he found where the raiders were taking everyone. But he did not need to venture across the sands to find them; there was an encampment towards the far end of the beach.

Tents with their canvas sheets and fire pits dug into the sand ad nauseam demarcated the outpost. A makeshift quay jutted into the waters towards the back with a ship tied up, a smaller tracked vessel with a forward turret beached off to the side. And iron pens large enough to corral a score of people stabbed into the good earth. People—no, things—were idling in the camp. They wore the drab colors of the fealltóirí who’d pillaged his lands, foul faces hidden in the aquatic coffins they called armor. Each was strange, industrial, often veiled with tight-meshed netting. He could not help but liken them to crustaceans he'd seen in the market near his home.

They were disassembling parts of the campsite to pack into crates and lugging said boxes into the moored vessel. It seemed a task suited for a larger group, yet they numbered only eighteen when he counted them, each with the tools of their vile trade at their side or slung over their shoulder. There was this odd lethargy present in their movements, a nonchalance that only blackened his thoughts the longer he watched them. He observed them circling around the heart of the campsite like ants to their mound. It was a large pavilion tent, sheets devoid of affectation and identity. There were several figures posted near two of the three openings. Situated around the central pavilion were impromptu buildings set up to hold whatever foul foods the beasts subsisted on. He could see a handful of individuals moving boxes full of ammunition from the one closest to the turreted vehicle, both positioned towards the back near the quay. Along the perimeter were large rectangular tents, several in the process of being taken down, where the fealltóirí no doubt slept; there were more than enough to shelter the group present. Then, between it all like interstitial tissue, were the wretched pens with their grimy metal bars and tamped down sand. All were vacant now, and that fact left him cold and empty.

If he was looking at it from ground level, it would seem disjointed and rife with wide sight lines. But he was not at ground level. Instead, he could look upon the encampment and see the exacting precision of its pentagrammic arrangement; the fire in his chest spread to his extremities.

Hours of daylight separated him from a sudden drop off the rockface if he followed the fire down the cliff, head emptied of everything his mam and father taught him. He had to wait. Floinn wanted to dash them, these wayward beasts ripped from some sow's belly, against the stones of Éire until emerald became ruby. He wanted to string them up on the cliffs by their intestines like Father Conchobhar did the wolf-man preying on the village. He wanted to visit upon them violence worse than they could conceive, but he had to wait.

When Father preached of His love, spoke of warmth to keep winter at bay, did he mean this fire burning in him? It did not feel like love.

The adolescent found a niche near the cliffside and tucked himself in, his pack and other accoutrements set aside. He waited with the weight of his long arm cradled against his chest, thumbing a score of notches scratched into the stock. If God was kind, then the tally would grow before the night was over.

Black smoke trailed from the cigarette resting in Zevchiah's mouth, catching in the canopy, while he leaned back in his chair. There was something in the smoke. Shapes, patterns? They were a pleasant diversion from the nighttime routine Isaac had everyone on. His mind played with the phenomenon as it drifted to join the cloud above while the body was left with everything else.

The soldier waved a hand through the haze, smoke coiling across his fingers before slipping away. He could not help but titter in response.

He dragged a lungful of what was left and felt ice quicken in his chest, veins of frost numbing where they crept into his extremities. Exhaled without feeling. There's tingling in his fingertips. Fingers walk up his spine, bracing him. A phantom he'd never met caressed him, coaxing the soreness of his muscles out with their touch. Something bubbling in his throat—words masticated by another—dredged the silt of his heart. But his body was unmoved, rock-still and at attention, like a man possessed.

Is this, he wondered, what the restless dead feel?

Zevchiah rocked his chair twice before letting his attention wander across the paper-strewn tabletop. Searching. He could feel the head rush waning. There was another stick somewhere near the paraffin lamp, but it rolled after he propped his feet on the table. Where was it? The pleasant chill of the cigarette was giving way to the lamp’s heat. He exhaled a cloud of smoke, swung his legs down and leaned forward, frustrated, feeling around and shifting papers until he found it. Then the wick, trapped behind sooty glass, flickered with the rustle of fabric behind; who else was seeking refuge from Isaac’s slave driving?

Ezekiel had a habit of trying to bum sticks off of him whenever he found a moment to himself, but this time was different. It had been a long two weeks. He had a headache from processing screaming children. His body remembered how sore it was. The last thing on his mind was sharing the dregs of his indulgence; whoever it was could pound sand for all he cared.

Then, when he found a spare match in his pocket, a gloved hand clamped over his mouth and a knife sunk deep into his throat.

The major arteries inside a man’s neck were similar in the animals Floinn tracked with his father, and he showed him where they lay in the stags they felled. Unconsciousness followed soon after severing them. Death soon after that. That was how his father taught him to kill things larger than himself—turn their body against them. He’d always wondered if there was more to the lessons than just hunting and skinning animals.

Despite his knife ripping through the heretic’s neck, they still had the nerve to flail and scratch at the hand clamped around their mouth. Struggling. The raider bit said hand in a blind panic, their hindbrain ignorant to the gaping hole. Floinn needed his whole body and the chair to keep them restrained. An awful noise gurgled in the man’s throat. Wet, panicked. The fealltóir twisted their body, blood spurting the more they fought until their ruddy complexion drained into the sand. Too long, too quick. It reminded Floinn of a stuck pig. Except it was a person he was murdering, not a pig.

The pain in his hand dulled as the tension in the man's jaw lessened, panicked breath dying against the fabric of his gloves. Why did his father neglect this? In the stories he hated telling, Floinn's father always described the light dimming in another’s eyes as haunting. He always dwelled on their pale bodies and rag doll metaphors. Why did he never mention their breath dying with them?

He pulled back from the convulsing corpse and stepped to the side, hands still shaking. Blood saturated the uniform, stained his gloves and dripped off his hands. Light from an overturned lamp glinted off his knife. This was not like hunting a deer or bleeding a hog, yet the motions were familiar enough. He looked at the body rather than his hands, the knife, or his grisly work. Glassy eyes, boyish features, scars marking their face. His middle brother looked like this when he was scattered across the floor.

Floinn felt his stomach lurch at the thought, astringent bile tasting of wild greens and rabbit burnt the back of his throat.

This is not my brother, he thought, it’s one of the animals that killed him. All of them. That's all they are—beasts, his father would say, donning the filthy rags of men. Floinn scrutinized the corpse and saw sooty burns blackening its fingers, a patina of healing scars broken by vein-thick cracks. The beast who strangled his father and broke his mother's jaw had arms like this. His stomach lurched again, disgust bubbling at the fore of a fire returned.

There was no time to linger longer than he already had; people will cycle through the tent. One dead, seventeen left.

He searched the interior for anything of importance before continuing the plan he’d cobbled together in the waning light. Ammunition, guns, anything to give him an edge. Fancy furniture decorated the space alongside stolen trinkets and accoutrements, much of which he had no name for. It all seemed garish, the décor like a poor quilt worried over by many seamstresses' hands. There were papers, folders, and maps scattered across the many tables present in the space, but he could parse very little of the script beyond the occasional name. The fealltóirí wrote in a different language. However, one word repeated more often than others around the few names he could read and recognize: עבד. It appeared next to his family’s names alongside the symbols, זונה, relegated to his mam and sister. Regardless, it all seemed important to the monsters here, so he grabbed handfuls paper and stuffed them into his pack.

There was movement near a tent flap, two guttural voices muffled by their foul armor. He saw two silhouettes muddled against the canvas fabric, firearms hung by straps over their shoulders. All his observations before sneaking into the pavilion turned up a smattering of automatic guns spread out between bolt-action rifles. It seemed an anemic array considering his father’s stories. Worry, venomous, crept through the margins of his fire and left him questioning if he could actually achieve what he came to do. Violent images threatened to consume his mind, the bloody ruin of his body and whatever they would do with it for sport.

For a moment, ice-bright fear split his veins and leeched the animus burbling in his heart. He remembered his mam entering his room early in the morning, no higher than her knee, to wake him with her linen-soft voice. You have to get up early, she'd say, so your father's knee does not worsen—you know how he is with the chores.

The fire in his chest blazed brighter.

Floinn pushed the corpse forward so it slumped against the table, obscuring the worst of the scuffle, before hiding behind a floral wood partition. Fealltóirí entered, one donned in a heavy suit with long-handled grenades at their belt and the other toting a bolt rifle, through the folding screen's gaps. They were talking in their harsh, guttural tongue. They called to the corpse before separating; the one with a rifle rounding the partition, saying something. His knife flicked up and he stepped forward to intercept, heart in his throat. He could see a strip of dirty, dusky skin framed by its odonate gas mask. He saw eyes through the lenses, saw them widen when the blade slipped into its neck, then he saw nothing but red. The reaver stumbled, hands reaching for their throat, and Floinn followed before he snapped the knife out the other side. It seemed odd how much easier it was to open someone's neck the second time. Their body dropped, and he brought his shotgun up as he pushed forward. But the heretic in armor was faster, sharp enough to not blind themselves with the assurance of comfort.

It shouldered the automatic he’d missed and stitched a line up his arm. Pain shocked his shoulder. He jerked aside, flinching with the fire coiling in his arm. Galvanized, teeth gritted, he squeezed the triggers and watched buckshot rip through the meat in front of him. Everything after was a play he was observing more than he was acting.

While the fire spread and people outside shouted, Floinn snatched the grenades off the armored's belt and his knife before fumbling with one of the handhelds. He remembered playing war with his friends and brothers, always the one to clear the bunker because he was bigger and privy to father's pillbox and trench stories. Father was always an animated storyteller—fealltóirí were converging faster than he expected; the pin popped free.

He flung the grenade opposite where he ran to give himself breathing room. People shouted behind him, panicked. An awful twist in his gut filled him with leporine-fear, prompting him to throw himself over a berm. Then the world exploded. Light and heat preceded a shower of grit, a shriek of hammers washed over him, and a sudden bonfire scraped the night sky and cast the beach in a smoky orange glow.

Floinn cracked open the long arm and slammed shells into the breach, then flicked shut the action as things stormed the berm. He popped over the ridge when a voice was near on top of him. It belonged to a wretched woman, adorned in chains and binding iron, that wore her skin like a moth-tattered shawl. A small part of him wondered if he knew her; if she had been like him before the fealltóirí took her. She carried a rusted cleaver and bloodied club. He couldn't make out her eyes past the slits in her helmet—she was charging him. Without the certainty of armor, he scattered her like a torn sack of barley that steamed in the mud made by steaming viscera.

Was this all his mam and sister could hope for as an ending if he could not find them in time? The fire threatened to escape his chest.

Voices shouted near the burning pavilion, then a pair of shots dug into the berm. He dipped low as the chatter of an automatic filled his ears and clawed across the sand. They knew where he was hiding now, but he didn’t know what to do next. Red deer did not shoot back. Everything was locking up and he was angry about it. At this rate, he was going to either sit here until a grenade bounced off his head or watch them circle around with their guns. Then he noticed the turret mounted on the tracked vehicle straddling the shoreline. They were the tusks of a great metal beast come to glut itself on the blood of his people. But it had gone unfed, anchored to the beach and left to watch over the encampment—would it feed on whatever’s put in front of it?

A gun was a gun no matter what, his father once said, and its purpose could be made right in the Lord's eyes if placed in righteous hands. Father Conchobhar said similar things, at times, but they always seemed at odds with his softer lessons when he was younger, the softness in his mother’s voice when she spoke of His love. But he cared little now; God’s love did not provide shelter.

He took the last handheld cinched to his belt and peeked over the berm between volleys, saw how close the mongrels had gotten, then ducked anew before flinging the grenade. A gaggle of voices shouted but the automatic refused to relent. Floinn waited until the world shook, then he dashed for the vehicle. Automatic silenced. Someone screaming behind him; an errant shot lanced his thigh. The fire in his chest dulled the pain, and he kept going. He clambered the vehicle's flank, bullets plink off the hull, then he’s face-to-face with two more moth-tattered people. One lacked half their helmet but had the skin of their face shorn away, studs piercing the meat of their cheek, and stared at Floinn with a dry, lidless, bloodshot eye. The other looked a little younger than himself with sparse adornments while the other seemed around his mother’s age. Saoraimad. They were hiding, shaking, neither saddled with a weapon. But the older of the pair with their shorn face saw the gun and rushed him, grabbed the barrel and forced a decision.

Lead leapt from the muzzle with a panicked squeeze of the trigger, vaporizing the wretch’s head in a loud bark that dominated the younger’s curdled cry.

Before he could process, the younger lunged for Floinn and knocked the long arm aside before clamping either hand around his neck. It was desperate, steeped in emotion. He reacted the same way when a mountainous monster with soot-blackened, burned skin crushed his father’s windpipe. Hair-trigger instinct yanked the knife from his sheathe and plunged it into the saoraimad stomach in quick succession, bloodying their midriff until it resembled minced meat. They became a twitching mass against him, thrown down in an animalistic reflex before he stepped back, breathing hard. He felt… wrong, all the blood dripping off his hands, soaking his sleeves—it felt wrong. But he swallowed the discomfort bubbling up his throat and moved to the vehicle's forward fangs.

All the time wasted on the saoraimad had cost him, though, because a fetish-laden fealltóir with a bloody axe and metal armor vaulted into the vehicle. He was knocked down by a savage kick from the brute. His mouth ached. Everything felt numb. Floinn scrambled for his knife, gun, anything to kill it, but the reaver yanked him back by the belt with axe raised high. Then its head exploded and vomited visceral ruin onto him and fell dead on top of him.

What just happened?

It didn’t matter.

He shoved the body and fumbled over to the turret while spitting out bone and brain matter, adding to the viscera painting the interior. The iron taste left by the boot was overwhelming now. Several figures were scattered across the way. Too close. Distracted? All for the better. Floinn wiped the gore from his eyes and checked the breech before scything bullets up the beach. The íospartach was ripped apart while the rest flung themselves onto the sand. It was difficult to control the turret. He couldn't tell if he was hitting anything; the automatic fire drowned out the world, the voices screaming in his head. There was something cathartic in how they cowered, how they prostrated themselves. When the fealltóirí came to his village, people were beaten until they looked like this. The pyre in his chest rose ever higher and left him crying, his face a jubilant collage of broken pottery.

The adolescent's manic revelry was interrupted by heavy, sudden movement off to the side. He swept the turret to starboard before a massive hand clamped down on the frame and wrenched it off the pintle mount in one clean motion. Floinn was taken with it. He tumbled across the ground, ears ringing, as grit stuck to him. Everything was a daze. His knife lay ahead? It was embedded in a shallow tidepool full of mollusks and urchins; the thunder of a mountain rumbled nearby. He scrambled across the sand until a ponderous boot planted itself between his shoulder blades, mashing his face into grit and salt water. A mountain muffled by the water bellowed from atop him. Still, he clawed at the ground, struggling to breathe against the sting in his lungs, and grabbed for that last vestige of his father.

Forcing himself up, he saw firelight from the pavilion dance across the inscription his father scratched into the hilt—Ná géill go deo. It was what his father always told him when he got frustrated, tired, or fended for his siblings.

The fire in his chest became a star.

When he felt the smooth material of the handle, Floinn took the knife and cranked back to stab where he thought the mountain’s ankle was, but he lacked leverage. It was ineffectual. The voice, however, seemed to laugh and moved the boot off his back before a meaty hand seized his neck, hoisting him up and turning him to meet the hateful fire in his eyes. A soot-stained, melted mountain of a monster met his gaze with its glaucous, basalt-harsh eyes. Its eyelids were gone, cut or burnt away long ago. The scarred, too-red ghoul leered at him until the rictus snarl of its lipless grin called to mind the vacuous stare of a rotting carcass he found washed up on the shore when he was younger.

“And as for you, boy.” He would never forget that voice, heavy like an avalanche and full of shattered glass. “I don't know why you decided to die here, but I am nothing if not accommodating.”

This was the monster that tore through his home, shattered his family; its hand tightened, slow, about his throat. Implacable, it was a monument to all the evils in the world, and it used that profane strength to hold Floinn fast while pushing its thumb into his larynx. No matter how he pried at its hand or stabbed its forearm, he could not escape its grip. It wanted to watch him die just like his father. So, it seemed, he was fated to fade away into the black creeping through his periphery.

Despite the black closing in on him, though, the pain was dull—wasn’t it meant to be sharp, clear?

He felt light; a balloon drifting off into the sky, numb and muted.

Pain was the proof of life, the currency with which the world dealt. If he had none left to spend, was that it? He'd die here without ever having been what his younger siblings needed, without ever having given back for all his mam did.

He was certain his father would have hung his head in shame, were he still alive.

Floinn found himself reliving halcyon days with frantic synapse spasms: Games with his brothers around the creek. Intimidating the boys too rough with his sister. But the strangulated adolescent clung to when he wove baskets with his mam by the fireplace to make ready for an upcoming journey to the nearest town.

His youngest sibling was nursing at his mam’s breast while he wove and she stitched holes in old trousers. She was humming an old song, rocking in her chair. Then, when he fed the fire, an errant ember nipped his fingers. Floinn remembered swearing, startling his sibling and his mam called him to her side. She tended to the burn, scolding his carelessness, calmed his sibling, then wiped his eyes dry with her muslin. He tried to mimic his father: stoic, even-keeled; he was much too old now to act this way over a trifle. But his mam tutted, smile wry and knowing.

“You're more like your father every day, àn stor,” she said.

“…I am?”

“Aye, he tries his best to reign in his anger, too, so people are not frightened by his anger. Righteous hands make for righteous ends, he says. He is such a silly man.”

She assured him the anger born inside his heart was not something to fear, however, like fire, he needed to guide it. Anger, cleansed by righteous hands, became their God-given answer to the evil borne in the hearts of men as much as the strength needed to meet that evil in kind. Floinn was born stronger than the rest. He was born special, she insisted, and that meant he could never use that strength or his anger for himself. His mam was insistent on that—use the strength God gifted to help others, never harm.

The fealltóir strangling him only ever used its strength to delight in the suffering of others.

Foam gathered at the corners of his mouth, spittle speckling the monster’s disgusting countenance while every fiber of his being strained to scream against the mitt crushing his windpipe. One of its pus-bloated eyes widened, head cocking. He wanted to gouge out those foul eyes. That fire in his chest, roaring from the hole where his heart was torn free, blazed until he thought he’d die from it. If God saw fit to gift him a font of strength with which to punish the injustice of the world, to tear down these vile monuments, rather than the love He had given to his family, then he would use it for just that purpose. There was nothing left for him, otherwise.

He poured everything into his arm, his hand, and wrenched its thumb off the swell of his larynx until something in the limb threatened to come undone. The most he could manage with the steel of his corded muscle was inch the digit off enough to steal a grounding breath of air, then ripped out his knife from the monster’s oversized forearm and drove it into its eye.

Its response was immediate, screaming and flinging him away in a moment of animal fury. He slammed hard against the boat, sputtering. Something in his body gave but he could not feel it.

The monster backpedaled, tore it from his eye then snapped the blade, and squeezed their face while viscous, deep crimson blood gushed from the wound. Obscenities poured from their mouth. It was a bleating boar swearing death unto him for his audacity. He wasn’t listening. A crack rang across the beach. Floinn forced his shaking body up despite the dull ache radiating across his back, wiping the blood from his mouth with his wrist, and readied himself to murder every other animal on this beach with his bare hands. Shouting, rapid gunfire, yet nothing hit him. When he looked up, he saw a blur of ochre cut through what few fealltóirí remained in an inspired dance that reminded him of the scenes depicted in stained church glass. That blur thrust towards the wounded mountain, somersaulted, and struck a twofold line of silver across its neck in the span of a breath. Then, when it landed, the ochre figure watched the newly made corpse slowly topple into a bloody, headless heap.

Behind the ochre smear were the dying fealltóirí, gunned down by a band of individuals bearing the unmistakable colors of the Papacy. His head swam. There was a man with a great, ornate, silver crucifix affixed to his back and an automatic at his side hurrying toward the ochre figure. But Floinn’s attention drifted back to the one adorned in weary, depressed ochre.

It turned to him, face obscured by the crystalline lenses of its strange helmet, deep crimson blood dripping from its polearm’s edge. Staring. He felt consciousness slipping away. For a moment, he thought the face of God might have lain behind that glass.

He felt the fire, dimming, in his chest flicker—then the dark took him.

#⚠️ warning : possible triggers within ⚠️#⚠️️ disturbing imagery ⚠️️#⚠️ graphic descriptions ⚠️#⚠️ graphic depictions of violence ⚠️#⚠️ death ⚠️#⚠️ gore ⚠️#⚠️ child death ⚠️#⚠️ child endangerment ⚠️#⚠️ personal project ⚠️#⚠️ short story ⚠️

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